The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg
ISBN: 9780748652150
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Edinburgh University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards) Literary Theory and Cultural Studies;

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg

Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, The Judicial Imagination argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times.

Key Features
*Returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma
* Provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights
*Offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities
*Makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies


Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in 1940s British Culture (Palgrave, 2007); The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (Macmillan, 1998) and the co-editor (with Marina Mackay) of British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Palgrave, 2006) and (with John Phillips) of Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998).

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