Law and Literature in the Romantic Era: The Law's Fictions

Abstract

This essay examines the emerging ideological relation between literature and law in the Romantic era and the significance of this relation to modern Western conceptualisations of what constitutes 'law' and 'literature'. In particular, the article explores the problematics of juridical textuality in the Romantic period – the extent to which the law comes to be regarded as text– and seeks to set this within the context of developing conceptualisations of 'literature' as a juridically defined commodity. The modern understanding of 'literature' began to be shaped in the Romantic era by a juridical re-formulation of the relation between the author, the text, the reader and the publisher: creative, original writing –'literature'– becomes a commodity copyrighted to an author/publisher. This development is accompanied by the State's recognition of the growing cultural and political power of new and diverse textual forms in an era of the mass production and consumption of 'literature', and the article considers alongside the contemporaneous formulation of copyright regulations the draconian censorship of textual production in this period. With reference to diverse juridical and literary sources (Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance, Blackstone's Commentaries, Bentham's Fragment on Government, Godwin's Enquiry and Caleb Williams, amongst others), I examine the extent to which these various phenomena reveal the subjection of textuality in the Romantic era to the modern force of law.