Title Imagining world order : literature and international law in early modern Europe, 1500-1800 / Chenxi Tang

Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 341 pages) Contents The old world order dissolving -- The poetics of international legal order -- International order as tragedy -- International order as romance -- The divergence between international law and literature around 1700 -- The novel and international order in the eighteenth century Summary "In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts--some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering--engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period--its so-called classical age--in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved"-- Publisher's Web site Analysis Law and literature, international law, world order, early modern Europe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marlowe, Barclay, Lohenstein, Anton Ulrich, Defoe, Sterne, Wieland, Camoes, comparative literature, sixteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century, intellectual history Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 14, 2018) Subject Law in literature. International relations in literature. European literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism European literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism International law -- History. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary. HISTORY -- Modern -- 16th Century. European literature International law International relations in literature Law in literature Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2018025998 ISBN 9781501716928 150171693X 9781501716935 1501716921 1501716913 9781501716911

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