Editorial Reviews
Review
"...a weighty contribution to literary studies." Studies in the Novel
"...the author develops considerable interest in the reader by pushing and pulling her law/literature/religion as testimony image back and forth to produce a series of insights that is always well informed, carefully thought through, and well demonstrated." College Literature
"A masterful handling of multiple disciplines, Schramm's analysis will be of interest to a range of nineteenth-century scholars." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920
"In this creative and well-written work of legal history, the author, a criminal defense lawyer and researcher at Cambridge University, links changes in criminal procedure to wider anxieties about the role of interpretation in the quest for factual truth. Though her sphere of inquiry is Victorian England, the issues she analyzes are still central to present-day debates about the adversarial system and the rules of evidence.' New York Law Journal
"the work deserves a broad readership within the Victorian studies community." Albion
"In this impressively researched and thoughtful book, Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the impact of changing ideas about evidence on the development of the English novel...Schramm brings together a complicated set of changes in legal, literary, and religious history in illuminating ways, raising fruitful questions for future study. In shedding new light on old questions about the nature of testimony and the quest for truth in fictional narrative, this work makes a valuable contribution both to Victorian studies and to histories of the novel." Victorian Studies
"...Schramm's work not only reaches back into the eighteenth century, but has important implications for contemporary law and literature theorists... this book is extraordinarily rich in its treatment of Victorian culture." Nineteenth Century Contexts
Book Description
This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm, who is both a lawyer and a literary critic, argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy that both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.
Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture),Jan-Melissa Schramm,Gillian Beer,Cambridge University Press,0521771234,18th century,19th century,English Literature (Specific Aspects),English literature,English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,General,History and criticism,Law (General),Law and literature,Literary Criticism,Literature - Classics / Criticism,England,English,English literature--19th century--History and criticism,Jurisprudence & General Issues,Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Literary studies: 19th century,c 1800 to c 1900
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