Riding the Black Ram

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Synopsis
Heinzelman (English, U. of Texas at Austin) juxtaposes legal and literary narratives within their historical contexts in order to demonstrate how they are mutually constitutive and in order to reveal how both narrative approaches are articulated within a nomos, as understood in Robert M. Cover's 1983 essay "Foreword: Nomos and Narrative" as the overall normative universe. However, finding Cover's regulating nomos to exclude women's experiences and to privilege male kinship relationships, she coins the term nostos as a necessary supplement to nomos that articulates its gendered nature and, in contrast to nomos's production of narratives of regulation and equity, identifies and produces otherwise unarticulated and gendered narratives of desire. Chapters discuss the juxtaposition of the Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" with the "Wife of Bath's Tale, the juxtaposition of 17th and 18th-century romance novels by French and English women writers with juridical narratives, how the disciplinary and generic formation and policing of novelistic and legal discourses in the 17th and 18th centuries are disturbed and gendered by Mary Delarivier Manley's 1714 novel Rivella, the operation of discursive boundaries in three narratives of a 1752 trial of a woman for the murder of her father, and the gendered and sexualized tropes found in cultural representations of three queens (including a cartoon of Queen Caroline published during her 1820 trial for treasonous adultery that depicts the queen as riding a black ram into the House of Lords, which Heinzelman reads as a metaphor for women's disruptive presence). Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Copyright:
2010

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780804773683
Related ISBNs:
9780804756808
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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