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Author Strain, Virginia Lee, author

Title Legal reform in English Renaissance literature / Virginia Lee Strain
Published Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press Ltd, [2018]
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 229 pages) : illustrations
Series Edinburgh critical studies in Renaissance culture
Edinburgh critical studies in Renaissance culture.
Contents Intro -- Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Series Editor's Preface -- Introduction -- 1 'Perpetuall Reformation' in Spenser's Faerie Queene 'Perpetuall Reformation' in Book V of Spenser's Faerie Queene -- Part I Perfection -- 2 Snaring Statutes and the General Pardon in the Gesta Grayorum -- 3 Legal Excess in John Donne's 'Satyre V' -- Part II Execution -- 4 The Assize Circuitry of Measure for Measure -- 5 The Winter's Tale and the Oracle of the Law -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene', the 'Gesta Grayorum', Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' and 'The Winter's Tale', Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Reevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works. Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-217) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Law and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century
English literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism
Law reform -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
English literature
Law and literature
Law reform
Great Britain
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2018285712
ISBN 9781474416290
1474416292
9781474416306
1474416306