Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 19
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
April 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781108938280

Book description

Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.

Reviews

‘In this superb book, Leila Neti uncovers some of the historical ways that literature and law co-operated across the Anglo-Indian colonial divide to imagine, produce, and contest political subjectivities and claims of sovereignty. In meticulous parallel readings of canonical Victorian novels and British judicial opinions on important Indian legal cases, she reveals how the cultural logic and epistemic violence of colonial administrative domination were being worked out, for other ends, in the pages of popular domestic fiction. Neti brings an invigorating postcolonial perspective to the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.’

Joseph R. Slaughter - Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York

‘Neti provides an important contribution to the field of Victorian literature, cultural, and legal Studies … Neti excels in her analysis of law, legal cultures, and legal imagination…’

Laura Lammasniemi Source: Victorian Studies

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.