TY - BOOK AU - Schneck,Peter TI - Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in U.S. American Culture T2 - Law & Literature , SN - 9783110253764 AV - PS169.L37 S35 2011eb U1 - 810.9/3554 22 PY - 2011///] CY - Berlin, Boston : PB - De Gruyter, KW - American literature KW - History and criticism KW - Law and literature KW - United States KW - History KW - Law in literature KW - Law in mass media KW - Recht in der Literatur KW - USA/Literatur, Literaturgeschichte KW - Wahrheit in der Literatur KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh KW - American Culture KW - American Literature 1700-2000 KW - Discourse on Truth KW - Law and Literature N1 - Frontmatter --; Acknowledgements --; Table of Contents --; Chapter 1. Law, Literature, and the Predicament of Representation --; Chapter 2. Legitimate Fictions: Rhetoric and Evidence in the Law-and-Literature Movement --; Chapter 3 Wieland ’s Testimony: Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of Evidence --; Chapter 4. The Judge and the Code: James Fenimore Cooper and the Common Law of Literature --; Chapter 5. Evidence and Identification: The Case(s) of To Kill a Mockingbird --; Chapter 6. Dissenting Opinions: William Gaddis, Alan Dershowitz, and the Spectacles of Media Justice --; Bibliography; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley’s famous phrase “the legislator of the world”, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110253771 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9783110253771 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9783110253771/original ER -