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E-book
Author Ferguson, Trish, author

Title Thomas Hardy's legal fictions / Trish Ferguson
Published Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2013]
©2013

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 178 pages)
Series Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture
Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture.
Contents Title Page; Imprint; Acknowledgements; Series Editor's Preface; Introduction; 1 'If You Only Knew Me Through and Through': The Domestic Trial Scene and Narrative Advocacy; 2 'I Was Not in My Senses, and a Man's Senses Are Himself': The Legal Defence of Insanity; 3 'I Hate to be Thought Men's Property in That Way': Married Women and the Law; 4 'Waiters on Chance': The Tichborne Claimant, Land Law Reform and Rural Dispossession; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index
Summary This book examines how Hardy's role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy's novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy's treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928 -- Criticism and interpretation
Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928 -- Knowledge -- Law
SUBJECT Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928 fast
Subject Legal stories, English -- History and criticism
Law in literature.
Lawyers in literature.
PHILOSOPHY -- History & Surveys -- Medieval.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Law
Law in literature
Lawyers in literature
Legal stories, English
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2013455256
ISBN 1299964060
9781299964068
9780748673254
0748673253
0748695257
9780748695256
0748673245
9780748673247