Publisher 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.

Author Biography

Leila Neti is an Associate Professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles. Her published articles have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Law and Literature, and in various edited collections.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Criminality: 1. 'A Power Able to Overawe Them All': Criminality and the Uses of Fear; 2. 'The Social Life of Crime': Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug; Part II. Temporality: 3. 'Injurious Pasts': The Temporality of Caste; 4. On Time: How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; Part III. Adoption and Inheritance: 5. 'The Begum's Fortune': Adoption, Inheritance, and Private Property; 6. 'Foundlings and Adoptees': Filiality in George Eliot's Novels; Afterword; Bibliography.

Review

'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

Promotional

Examines the shared cultural genealogy of popular Victorian novels and judicial opinions of the Privy Council.

Promotional "Headline"

Examines the shared cultural genealogy of popular Victorian novels and judicial opinions of the Privy Council.

Description for Bookstore

Focusing on criminality, caste, inheritance and adoption, this text illustrates how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, broader Victorian ideological norms, appealing to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, colonial and legal history, and particularly Indian colonial culture.

Description for Library

Focusing on criminality, caste, inheritance and adoption, this text illustrates how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, broader Victorian ideological norms, appealing to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, colonial and legal history, and particularly Indian colonial culture.

Details