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  3. Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination
  • Cited by 20
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
April 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781108938280
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938280
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (128)
Information

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

‘In all, by shining a light on the similarities between legal narratives in Victorian literature and culture and the case law of the JCPC, Neti is successful in her stated aim to add new dimensions to existing scholarship by illuminating new ways in which to view both the legal archive and works of fiction. Her work provides a useful framework for legal historians, and in particular for historians of legal transfer, to explore the extent to which popular social narratives of the Victorian era influenced the development the colonial judicial process in India.’

Erica Kim Ollikainen-Read Source: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History

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