British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century

Melissa J. Ganz is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. She is the author of Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (2019), winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. Her essays on legal and ethical dimensions of British fiction have appeared in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Review of English Studies, and ELH, as well as in several edited collections. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale.

Introduction Melissa J. Ganz; 1. 'Every common reader': satire, libel law, and the emergence of objective interpretive procedures, ca. 1670–1730 Andrew Benjamin Bricker; 2. Perpendicular publics: contesting infrastructure at early eighteenth-century rail crossings David Alff; 3. Ambivalence, survival, and law in Defoe's journal of the plague year Kathryn D. Temple; 4. The court of justice and the court of conscience: legal ethics in Tom Jones Suzanna Geiser; 5. 'A higher tribunal': equity, law, and the family in sir Charles Grandison Melissa J. Ganz; 6. Mansfield, burrow, and the reformulation of the legal decision Simon Stern; 7. Novel subjects: naturalization in Richardson and Edgeworth Stephanie DeGooyer; 8. Common law and cultural difference in Scott's ivanhoe and chronicles of the canongate Anne Frey; 9. The legal character of paupers in early nineteenth-century England Mark Schoenfield; 10. Liberty in 'Parenthesis': the case of the slave, grace (1827) and antislavery satire in the history of Mary Prince (1831) Sarah Winter; 11. Yearning for restriction in the romantic novel: propagating conservative legal norms in right-wing literary podcasts and religion-centered editions of works by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley Nicole Mansfield Wright.