Law and Literature - Law and Literature in Europe

Law and Literature in Europe

The Law and Literature movement in Europe is wide-ranging and fruitful and a number of networks in Europe are significant to the movement. There is for example a European Network for Law and Literature Scholarship run by Jeanne Gaakeer, Professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Greta Olson, Professor at the Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen. Gaakeer’s influence is also reflected in her publications, for example Hope Springs Eternal: An Introduction to the Work of James Boyd White (University of Michigan, 1998), and she is co-editor of Crossing Borders: law, language and Literature, Wolf Legal Publishers The Netherlands, 2008. Greta Olsen has edited a number of books including 9/11 Ten Years On(2011) Current Trends in Narratology. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011 and In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004a. There is also a Nordic Network for Law and Literature and two Italian Networks for Law and Literature, AIDEL and ISLL. In Norway: The Bergen School of Law and Literature, directed by Professor Arild Linneberg, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen. Law and Literature in Europe is energetic but at times less self-promoting than its American counterpart. Greta Olson’s article ‘De-Americanising Law and Literature Narratives: Opening Up the Story’ in the journal ‘Law and Literature’ 2010 (published by Cardozo in the USA) provides a reminder of scholarly activity in Europe as well as warning against a ‘tendency to universalise our scholarly narratives’ where some debates are particular to the American setting. She calls upon European scholars to ‘remember that the peculiarities of our own legal systems and legal histories need to be kept in mind as we contest law with the aesthetic and use law to query the literary’.

Post-conference productions such as the Oxford University Press collection Law and Literature: Current Legal Issues Volume 2: Law and (1999) edited by Michael Freeman and Andrew Lewis are testament to the number of approaches opened up by this interdisciplinary approach. In the United Kingdom, scholars of note include Maria Aristodemou, with her Law and Literature from her to eternity, which looks at a number of texts from ancient Greek to modern day novels from a feminist and postmodern perspective. Adam Gearey’s Law and Aesthetics provides a discussion of aesthetics and ethics relevant to contemporary law and literature scholarship, and to the development of postmodern jurisprudence, using a range of reference points from classical literature, from Sophocles to Shelley to Nietzsche. Professor Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives which considers a range of texts from Shakespeare, to children’s literature, to Ivan Klima and Umberto Eco and, more recently Ward’s Law, Text, Terror, looking at the phenomena of terror and the rhetoric of terrorism tracing back through literature, popular culture and politics. Professor Melanie Williams’ book Empty Justice: One Hundred Years of Law, Literature and Philosophy explores in particular feminist and existential questions as well as genre movements relating to caselaw combined with works by, for example, Thomas Hardy, J. G. Ballard, John Fowles, J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, whilst her Secrets and Laws provides a range of essays on legal and political issues of note, from ethics, terrorism and identity to notions of obscenity, rape, sex and violence, through the prism of poetry, W. H. Auden and R. S. Thomas as well as 19th and 20th century works of fiction. Kieran Dolin’s A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature takes in a wide range of historical periods from Renaissance literature to Victorian literature and modern texts, exploring a number of topical approaches to crime, feminism, race and colonialism, whilst Paul Raffield’s Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution : late Elizabethan politics and the theatre of law (Hart, 2010) is an addition to the critical work available on Shakespeare and the Law. The Italian law and literature scholar Daniela Carpi has also written a book on Shakespeare and the Law as well as an interesting text discussing Plato’s relevance to 20th century English Literature.

These instances of European outputs in the Law and Literature movement are in no way representative of the large literature to be found in articles written by the above named scholars as well as others in the field.