The Judicial Imagination - by Lyndsey Stonebridge (Paperback)

About the Book

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

Book Synopsis

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 an aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including 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.

From the Back Cover

The Judicial Imagination tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Acclaim for the hardback edition: 'Analyzing disciplinary and stylistic practices among such thinkers as Arendt, West, Spark, and Gellhorn, The Judicial Imagination fully matches the rigor, moral authority, and observational acumen of its subjects. This is an important and unusually enriching study.' Michael Steinberg, Keeney Professor of History and Director, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University 'Lyndsey Stonebridge's The Judicial Imagination examines the works of various women writers who turned to narrative in light of the perceived historical failures and inadequacies of the law. Like her subjects, Stonebridge is concerned with how the act of fiction-making itself can serve as a response to some of the most difficult problems posed in the recognition of human rights. Drawing from a range of texts and authors, Stonebridge delivers persuasive readings that reveal the recuperative possibilities of narrative and its construction during the particularly fraught moments of the post-war period.' James Dawes, Macalester College, author of Evil Men and That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity '[I]n Stonebridge's brilliant and searching book ... the key terms are "judgement", "refugee", "suffering", and "irony" ...Postwar writing, claims Stonebridge, cannot fully dissociate itself from suffering to take the measure of catastrophe, or to allow it the distance that memory imposes ... To prove this argument, Stonebridge provides innovative, finely detailed readings.' Allan Hepburn, James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, McGill Universtiy, Clio 41:3 2012 'Stonebridge eloquently addresses a dilemma at the heart of the judicial imagination--the tension between law and poetic justice, traumatic history that resists comprehension and the ethical testimony of literature.' Mary Jacobus, Professor Emerita, University of Cambridge, Professor Emerita, Cornell University. 'For its demonstration of what literature can do beyond giving 'voice' to the voiceless, this book deserves to be read widely." Anna Bernard, King's College, London, Textual Practice Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Writing of Anxiety (2007) and The Destructive Element (1998), and co-editor of British Fiction after Modernism, with Marina MacKay (2007), and Reading Melanie Klein, with John Phillips (1998). She is currently completing a new book, Reading Statelessness: Rights, Writing and Refugees.

Review Quotes

...for its demonstration of what literature can do beyond giving 'voice' to the voiceless, this book deserves to be read widely.--Anna Bernard, Kings College London "Textual Practice"

Analyzing disciplinary and stylistic practices among such thinkers as Arendt, West, Spark, and Gellhorn, The Judicial Imagination fully matches the rigor, moral authority, and observational acumen of its subjects. This is an important and unusually enriching study.--Michael Steinberg, Keeney Professor of History and Director, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University

Contemporary literary criticism at its best.-- "New Statesman"

Stonebridge eloquently addresses a dilemma at the heart of the judicial imagination--the tension between law and poetic justice, traumatic history that resists comprehension and the ethical testimony of literature.--Mary Jacobus, Professor of English, University of Cambridge

Stonebridge opens up new ways to understand postwar literature.--Allan Hepburn "Clio 41:3 2012"

About the Author

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).