Front cover image for Victory of law : the Fourteenth amendment, the Civil War, and American literature, 1852-1867

Victory of law : the Fourteenth amendment, the Civil War, and American literature, 1852-1867

This interdisciplinary study sheds light on the transformative significance of emerging legalist and constitutionalist forms of antislavery thinking on the literature of the 1850s and 1860s and the growing centrality of aesthetic considerations to antebellum American legal theory and practice -- the historical terms in which a distinctively American cultural identity was conceived
Print Book, English, 2006
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006
History
xii, 239 pages ; 24 cm
9780801883507, 9780801889318, 0801883504, 0801889316
62282043
Preface
Introduction
1. Victory of Law: Melville and Reconstruction
2. Shadows of Law: Somerset and the Literature of Abolition
3. Constitutional Disobedience: Thoreau, Sumner and the Transcendental Law of the 1850s
4. Legal Sentences: Hawthorne's Sovereign Performatives and Hermeneutics of Freedom
5. John Bingham's Poetic Constitution