Synopses & Reviews
Examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature.
Review
"...raises good questions and consistently provokes." American Historical Review"Crane presents...compelling readings that elucidate how the interplay between fictional writers and jurists generated a racial alchemy that ultimately destabilized core concepts of the legal system: higher law, contract, and the law of the majority." American Historical Review
Review
"...raises good questions and consistently provokes." American Historical Review"Crane presents...compelling readings that elucidate how the interplay between fictional writers and jurists generated a racial alchemy that ultimately destabilized core concepts of the legal system: higher law, contract, and the law of the majority." American Historical Review
Synopsis
In this broad ranging study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, this is a remarkably original book, that will revise the relationship between Race and Nationalism in American literature.
About the Author
Gregg Crane is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University. He has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1986. He has published in American Literary History, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Higher law in the 1850s; 2. The look of higher law: Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery fiction; 3. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism: Emerson and Douglass; 4. The positivist alternative; 5. Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey: citizenship and the flux of contract.