Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology: (Series Number 27 Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

The eighteenth-century model of the criminal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the facts of a case could 'speak for themselves' - was abandoned in 1836, when legislation enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony. Increasingly, professional acts of interpretation were seen as necessary to achieve a just verdict, thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given by eye witnesses at criminal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound impact of the changing nature of evidence in law and theology on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Already a locus of theological conflict, the idea of testimony became a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate about the ethics of literary and legal representation. She argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their storytelling counterparts at the Bar.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; Introduction: justice and the impulse to narrate; 1. Eye-witness testimony in the construction of narrative; 2. The origins of the novel and the genesis of the law of evidence; 3. Criminal advocacy and Victorian realism; 4. The martyr as witness: inspiration and the appeal to intuition; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Review :
"...a weighty contribution to literary studies." Studies in the Novel "...the author develops considerable interest in the reader by pushing and pulling her law/literature/religion as testimony image back and forth to produce a series of insights that is always well informed, carefully thought through, and well demonstrated." College Literature "A masterful handling of multiple disciplines, Schramm's analysis will be of interest to a range of nineteenth-century scholars." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 "In this creative and well-written work of legal history, the author, a criminal defense lawyer and researcher at Cambridge University, links changes in criminal procedure to wider anxieties about the role of interpretation in the quest for factual truth. Though her sphere of inquiry is Victorian England, the issues she analyzes are still central to present-day debates about the adversarial system and the rules of evidence.' New York Law Journal "the work deserves a broad readership within the Victorian studies community." Albion "In this impressively researched and thoughtful book, Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the impact of changing ideas about evidence on the development of the English novel...Schramm brings together a complicated set of changes in legal, literary, and religious history in illuminating ways, raising fruitful questions for future study. In shedding new light on old questions about the nature of testimony and the quest for truth in fictional narrative, this work makes a valuable contribution both to Victorian studies and to histories of the novel." Victorian Studies "...Schramm's work not only reaches back into the eighteenth century, but has important implications for contemporary law and literature theorists... this book is extraordinarily rich in its treatment of Victorian culture." Nineteenth Century Contexts