Title Colonial law in India and the Victorian imagination / Leila Neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles

Published Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021 ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 302 pages) Series Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contents I. Criminality -- 'A Power Able to Overawe Them All': Criminality and the Uses of Fear -- The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug -- II. Temporality -- Injurious Pasts: The Temporality of Caste -- On Time: How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone -- III. Adoption and Inheritance -- The Begum's Fortune: Adoption, Inheritance, and Private Property -- Foundlings and Adoptees: Filiality in the Novels of George Eliot Summary "Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination reads works of fiction from the nineteenth century alongside three legal cases heard before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which was the highest court of appeal for colonies within the British Empire. By pairing legal judgments with novels by prominent Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Philip Meadows Taylor, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, I show how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, the broader ideals of imperial expansionism during the nineteenth century. Rather than thinking of the legal and literary realms as distinct, however, I read the judicial opinions as instances of narrative that share many of the same tropes and strategies typical to the nineteenth-century novel. The legal cases in the study are summarized in Moore's Indian Appeals, a 14-volume catalog of appeals from Indian courts to the Privy Council from 1836 to 1872. The written summaries of the cases, consumed as texts, were the main avenue through which an English audience could become acquainted with legal disputes in India. And, as is clear from my readings of the judicial opinions, the Privy Council used modes of narrativity (to organize temporality, character, plot etc.) that were also commonplace in Victorian literature. Reading the legal texts as literature allows us to explore the division between reality and fiction, and to look at the ways in which legal opinions created norms that intersected, often unpredictably, with other forms of cultural representation. As this book demonstrates, reading the archives of the JCPC and the Victorian novel together opens up a series of questions. Does fiction shape materiality in ways that are similar to how materiality shapes fiction? Does reading a text as fiction create different strategies and avenues of interpretation? Is what we think of as reality possible outside of the turns of imagination that we recognize in fiction? These are some of the questions that motivate this study and which Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination seeks to answer"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 20, 2021) Subject Great Britain. Privy Council. Judicial Committee. SUBJECT Great Britain. Privy Council. Judicial Committee fast Subject English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism Law and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century Narration (Rhetoric) Justice, Administration of -- India -- History -- 19th century English fiction Justice, Administration of Law and literature Narration (Rhetoric) Great Britain India Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2020055530 ISBN 9781108938280 1108938280 9781108944595 1108944590

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