The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law

Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new
perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has
gained global prominence in the course of the last decades of the twentieth and
the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the research and
teaching of law with a considerable body of new and valuable knowledge and
understanding. Most of the knowledge and insights generated by the movement
concern either a thematic overlap between legal and literary discourses – suggesting
they deal with the same moral concerns – or a rhetorical, semiotic or
general linguistic comparability or ‘sameness’ between them – imputing to both
the same or very similar narrative structures. The Literary Exception and the
Rule of Law recognises the wealth of knowledge generated by this approach to
the relation between law and literature, and acknowledges its debt to this genre
of scholarship. It nevertheless also proposes, on the basis of a number of
revealing phenomenological inquiries, a different approach to law and literary
studies: one that emphasises the irreducible difference between law and literature.
It does so with the firm belief that a regard for the very different and
indeed opposite discursive trajectories of legal and literary language allows for
a more profound understanding of the unique and indeed separate roles that
the discourses of law and literature generally play in the sustenance of relatively
stable legal cultures. This important rethink of the relationship between law and literature will
appeal to scholars and students of legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy,
politics and literary theory