Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature

The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature surveys the intersection between two important fields of study. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume showcases the many ways in which literary and legal methods and insights both converge and remain distinct.

Written by an international collective of expert contributors, the Encyclopedia brings together a wide variety of perspectives on the diverse legal and literary traditions. Entries balance history, theory, criticism, and traditional legal categories such as defamation, equity, evidence, and trials. Topics covered include recognised areas of law such as blackmail, felonies, wills, and literature such as gothic fiction, satire, and tragedy. Recent and emerging topics include environmental personhood, Undocu Literature, and Black Lives Matter poetry.

This Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for law students, researchers and scholars working in law or literature as separate disciplines, and in the increasingly important interdisciplinary space of law and literature.

• Over 130 wide-ranging entries
• Written in an engaging and accessible style
• Individual bibliographies for further reading
• Entries by both established and emerging scholars

‘This Encyclopedia is wonderfully versatile. Many of its scholarly entries serve as primers on the key principles and analytic tools for understanding the rich interactions between legal thinking and writing and literary and rhetorical forms. Others exhibit dazzling creativity in identifying the catalytic relationships between law literature as sources of insight into all manner of social, political, and economic issues,placing them in a richly generative cultural context. Overall, this is an indispensable guide to the capacious world of law and the Humanities.’ -- Robert Weisberg, Stanford Law School, USA
‘Edward Elgar has had the style, wisdom and whetstone of wit, to engage the two preeminent encyclopedists of our times, the contemporary Diderot and D’Alembert, to orchestrate the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature. The genius of the enterprise lies in commissioning fresh essays on cutting edge topics from the leading figures in interdisciplinary legal studies. The result is constantly surprising and enlightening, a cornucopia and rhabdomancy of the jurisliterary issues of our conflicted times. As the late legal philosopher Pierre Legendre liked to opine, the literary art of law, that of bene dicendi, translates best as speaking justly. The wild array of essays collected here in properly encyclopedic fashion and novelty not only speak justly but in speaking concisely also speak well.’ -- Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, USA
‘This is an extraordinary book. It does much to refresh and revive law and literature as a field of inquiry. It does so by focusing on legal and cultural problems and bringing to bear the resources of law and literature to interrogate those problems. Rarely can an Encyclopedia galvanize a field. This is one of those times.’ -- Austin Sarat, Amherst College, US

Edited by Robert Spoo, Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters, Department of English, Princeton University, USA and Simon Stern, Professor of Law and English, University of Toronto, Canada

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