The Judicial Imagination

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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 "Stonebridge eloquently addresses a dilemma at the heart of the judicial imagination--the tension between law and poetic justice, and between traumatic history that resists comprehension and the ethical testimony of literature." Mary Jacobus, Professor of English, University of Cambridge AUTHOR APPROVED BLURB 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 uncovers an urgent aesthetics of judgement in the writing of the postwar period's most compelling writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen 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. Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Writing of Anxiety (2008) and The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998), and the co-editor of British Fiction after Modernism (2008) (with Marina Mackay) and Reading Melanie Klein (1998) (with John Phillips).