TY - BOOK AU - Tang,Chenxi TI - Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 SN - 9781501716935 AV - PN56.L33 U1 - 809/.933554 23 PY - 2018///] CY - Ithaca, NY PB - Cornell University Press KW - European literature KW - 18th century KW - History and criticism KW - Early modern, 1500-1700 KW - International law KW - History KW - International relations in literature KW - Law in literature KW - Legal History & Studies KW - Literary Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 16th Century KW - bisacsh KW - Law and literature, international law, world order, early modern Europe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marlowe, Barclay, Lohenstein, Anton Ulrich, Defoe, Sterne, Wieland, Camoes, comparative literature, sixteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century, intellectual history N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction --; 1. The Old World Order Dissolving --; 2. The Poetics of International Legal Order --; 3. International Order as Tragedy --; 4. International Order as Romance --; 5. The Divergence between International Law and Literature around 1700 --; 6. The Novel and International Order in the Eighteenth Century --; Epilogue --; Notes --; References --; Index; restricted access N2 - In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions.Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved UR - https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501716935 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781501716935 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781501716935/original ER -