Character, Writing, and Reputation in Victorian Law and Literature: (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities)

Why would Hawthorne and Eliot grant their fallen women an anachronistic right to silence that could only worsen their punishment? Why did Bronte and Gaskell find gossip such a useful source of information when lawyers excluded it as hearsay? How did Trollope's work as an editor influence his preoccupation throughout his novels with libel? Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law, and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterisation mingled with character-centred legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession. She explores how key categories and representational strategies for imagining individual personhood also defined communities and mediated relations within them, in life and in fiction.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Character-Building: Narrative Theory, Narrative Jurisprudence and the Idea of Character Incriminating Character: Revisiting the Right to Silence in Adam Bede and The Scarlet Letter Gossip, Hearsay, and the Character Exception: Reputation on Trial in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and R v. Rowton Defamation of Character: Anthony Trollope and the Law of Libel Dignity, Disclosure and the Right to Privacy: The Strange Characters of Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray The English Dreyfus Case: Status as Character in an Illiberal Age Works Cited

About the Author :
Cathrine O. Frank is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major, University of New England, Maine, USA

Review :
From its contribution to the subfield in literary studies focusing on character to its development of "character talk" as a wide bridge between law, literature, and a number of fields, Character: Writing and Reputation enlivens both legal and literary studies by taking on character, too often ignored in both disciplines. The book’s extensive legal history and assessment, along with case studies of character and reputation taken from the Victorian novel, offer much to law and literature scholars interested in the development of privacy and libel law in the period. Frank presents an erudite, engaging, and challenging account of ways literary and legal constructions of character interanimate in Victorian culture.