Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology

di Jan-Melissa Schramm (Autore)

Cambridge University Press, 2006

The eighteenth-century model of the criminal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the facts of a case could 'speak for themselves' - was abandoned in 1836, when legislation enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony. Increasingly, professional acts of interpretation were seen as necessary to achieve a just verdict, thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given by eye witnesses at criminal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound impact of the changing nature of evidence in law and theology on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Already a locus of theological conflict, the idea of testimony became a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate about the ethics of literary and legal representation. She argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their storytelling counterparts at the Bar.

• Autore: Jan-Melissa Schramm
• Editore: Cambridge University Press
• Collana: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Anno: 2006
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 264 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• Peso: 390 gr.
• EAN: 9780521026352

Testo in English