Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature / Edition 1

by Gregg D. Crane

Overview

Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity and race and justice within American law and literature in this study. He recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law in accord with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression are evil. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, and a range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this original book will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521010931
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/24/2002
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #128
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.63(d)
Lexile:	1780L (what's this?)

About the Author

Gregg Crane is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University. He has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1986. He has published in American Literary History, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Higher law in the 1850s; 2. The look of higher law: Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery fiction; 3. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism: Emerson and Douglass; 4. The positivist alternative; 5. Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey: citizenship and the flux of contract.

Editorial Reviews

"...raises good questions and consistently provokes." American Historical Review

"Crane presents...compelling readings that elucidate how the interplay between fictional writers and jurists generated a racial alchemy that ultimately destabilized core concepts of the legal system: higher law, contract, and the law of the majority." American Historical Review

From the Publisher