This 24-lecture course offers a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between law and literature by examining representative moments in the long history of these two interwoven ways of ordering the world, both representations of culture through language, image, symbol systems, and action.

Lectures:

1. Literature as Law, Literature of Law
2. The Old Testament as Law and Literature
3. Revenge and Justice in Aeschylus’s Oresteia
4. Community in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus
5. Ritual Order in Mystery and Morality Plays
6. Chaucer’s Lawyers and Priests
7. Inns of Court, Royal Courts, and the Stage
8. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1596–97)
9. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603–04)
10. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1609–11)
11. An Epic Trial—Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
12. Moll Flanders (1722); Beggar’s Opera (1727)
13. Trial Tales of Parricide: Mary Blandy (1752)
14. Property and Self—Edgeworth, Burney, Austen
15. Law as Fog—Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53)
16. Puritans Anew—The Scarlet Letter (1850)
17. Slavery and Huckleberry Finn (1885)
18. Victorian Limits—Tess and Jude the Obscure
19. Susan Glaspell’s “Jury of Her Peers” (1917)
20. Kafka and 20th-Century Anxiety about Law
21. Lolita (1958) and the Art of Confessing
22. “Witnessing” Slavery in Beloved (1987)
23. Maternal Infanticide—Myth and Judgment
24. Literature and Law—Past, Present, Future