World Literature and Law

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-24503-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 294 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 246 mm

The study of law and literature has become global, and now encompasses legal traditions and literary histories from across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Paradigms such as international law and literature, postcolonialism, and the Global South have further added to the richness of the field. As law and literature takes root in different regions, and as its intellectual and geographical terrain expands, there is a need to re-examine its foundational assumptions, theoretical paradigms, and interpretative praxes. What can we learn from established practices, and what new conceptual frameworks should we develop, to engage with the world’s increasingly diverse jurisprudences, literatures, and cultures? What, in short, might the study of world literature and law look like?

This collection maps the global turn in law and literature, foregrounds under-represented regions, and charts new directions for the twenty-first century. Featuring case studies from Argentina, China, India, Nigeria, and South Africa among others, contributors revisit jurisprudence and aesthetics; trace colonial genealogies of policing and borders; interrogate sexuality, gender and reproduction; and stage conversations between legal reasoning, narrative form and visual culture. Synthesising comparative, postcolonial and international perspectives, the volume surfaces fresh conceptual tools and agendas for research and teaching.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of law, literature, comparative literature, legal theory, socio-legal studies and postcolonial studies. The essays in this collection were first published in various issues of Law & Literature.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wan, Marco

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: World Literature and Law 1. Derring Literarity: The Case of Negative Comparative Law 2. Disrupting Undocumentation: Municipal ID Cards Against Passport Fetishism 3. Guilty, until Proven Innocent: The Fossilization of Discriminatory Policies in Visa Law and Policy as Portrayed in Anna Segher’s Transit and Juan de Recacoechea’s American Visa 4. Tragic Staging as Critique in the War Crimes Tribunal: The Suicide of Slobodan Praljak 5. Emblems Performing Law 6. The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation 7. “The Love Laws”: Section 377 and the Politics of Queerness in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things 8. “Land[s] beyond the White World”: (Re)imagining the International through Fiction 9. Literature as Legal History: Understanding the Colonial Roots of the Nigerian Police Force 10. On What Mutters: The Unnamable Subject of Practical Reason Finnis.Raz…Beckett.Cha 11. Annie Ernaux, Dobbs, and the Right to Tell Abortion Stories 12. Adoption Archives: Documents, Subjecthood, and the Possibility of Justice 13. Into One’s Own Hands: The Shape of Justice in China’s Rust Belt 14. The War on Drugs between Exception and Legitimacy: García Márquez’s News of a Kidnapping 15. Law and Literature in Argentina 16. The Union of India: Bodily Unity in Indian Law and Literature 17. Planetary Gifts of Law and Literature

Über Autor(innen)

Marco Wan is Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Literary Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong. He serves as the Managing Editor of Law & Literature. His publications include Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (2021) and Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (2017; winner of the biennial Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia). He is currently co-editing a volume that examines the intersections between literature and law across the anglophone colonial and postcolonial world.