Subjects:

General Interest

Contents:

Inventing Reality

1: Myths of Origins and Origins of Myths: Beyond Oedipus?

2: Theatre of Woman Re-Playing the Word: Towards the Triumph of the Flesh in Aeschylus' Oresteia

3: The Marriage of Death and Desire in Measure for Measure

4: World Before and Beyond Difference: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

5: Law in the Realm of the Senses: Camus's Outsider

6: Fantasies of Women as Law-Makers in Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers

7: Archive Fever that Misses the Fire: Legal and Other Textual Memories in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

8: Language, Ethics, and the Imagination in Toni Morrison's Beloved

9: Dream Harder: For a Goddess in Borges' Fiction

10: Inventing Reality: The Lawyer in His Labyrinth and From Her to Eternity.

Any attempt to understand the world by means of language, in law or in literature, is an attempt to create, and impose, order on what is beyond our comprehension. However, whilst literature admits its own artificiality, law insists that it provides not only all the answers but all the right answers. Using literary examples from the Oedipus myth, through Shakespeare to modern authors such as Albert Camus and Angela Carter, Aristodemou works from the assumption that not just literature but also law are fictions, and she suggests ways in which literature can help us understand better the mythic origins of law. In doing so she shows how we can learn from the fictionality of literature new ways of addressing and living with the fictionality of law. This book is intended for second year law degree students taking an optional law and literature course.