Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schramm, Jan‐Melissa
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

George Eliot and the Law

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.309-322

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Online Books - All Titles (includes Withdrawn titles)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this essay, the author likes to situate George Eliot's compelling representation of fictional trials—both criminal and civil—alongside these larger questions of moral obligation, duty, and individual or national “conscience”. Of all the mid‐Victorian novelists, she possessed arguably the keenest sense of the ways in which law was a product of its socio‐cultural context even as it attempted to distance itself from the strategies of persuasion that it shared with rhetoric and fictional story‐telling. Her understanding that the law is complex in its application is manifest in the frequency with which she stages a competition between what we might call first‐ and third‐person perspectives of human experience. And even as she sought to ground her own narrative realism in the rules of evidence which governed the provision of accurate evidence in a court of law, she revealed time and time again her willingness to reach beyond law's formalism.