The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of PossessionIn this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. Best also argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, Best helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, The Fugitive's Properties sets new agendas for scholars of American literature and legal culture. |
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Procura do Utilizador - rivkat - LibraryThingLiterary theory attempt to meld property law with cultural analysis; mostly flew over my head. As I understand the argument: Slavery, or fugitive slaves, served as a metaphor or playing out of the ... Ler crítica na íntegra
Índice
| 1 | |
| 27 | |
Chapter Two The Fugitives Properties Uncle Toms Incalculable Dividend | 99 |
Chapter Three Counterfactuals Causation and the Tenses of Separate but Equal | 201 |
The Rules of the Game | 269 |
Notes | 277 |
Index | 353 |
Outras edições - Ver tudo
The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best Pré-visualização limitada - 2004 |
The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best Pré-visualização indisponível - 2004 |
Palavras e frases frequentes
abstraction action American appears argument authority become body called capital century character Chicago claim common conception concerns consequences consider Constitution contract corporation counterfactual Court criticism culture difference distinction doctrine economic effect equal exchange expression fact figure film finds first follows fugitive future give hand Holmes human imagination individual intellectual intent interest John Justice labor language law’s literary logic matter means metaphor mind minstrel moral musical narrative natural nineteenth-century notes object offer original particular person play political possession practice present principle production protection provides question race reason reference regard relation rhetoric rule seems sense short slave slavery social specific speculative standard Stowe Stowe’s structure taken theory thing thought tion transformation translation turn Uncle Tom’s Cabin United University Press writing York
Passagens conhecidas
Página 10 - A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.
Página 217 - The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case,' and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption.
Página 69 - And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description.
Página 171 - ... and with proof, also by affidavit, of the identity of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due as aforesaid, that the person so arrested does in fact owe service or labor to the person or persons claiming him or her, in the state or territory from which such fugitive may have escaped as aforesaid...
Página 275 - Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
Página 10 - It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men in succession with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being.
Página 217 - A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguish distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
Página 159 - By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him...
Página 173 - What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
Referências a este livro
Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-century Literature Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Visualização de excertos - 2007 |
Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the ... Theo Davis Pré-visualização indisponível - 2007 |
Informação bibliográfica
| Título | The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession |
| Autor | Stephen M. Best |
| Edição | ilustrada |
| Editora | University of Chicago Press, 2010 |
| ISBN | 0226241114, 9780226241111 |
| Número de páginas | 376 páginas |
| Exportar citação | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |