Anne Quema

Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature Anne Quema

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Table of Contents: Introduction1. Symbolic Power and Legitimacy2. Social Poiesis and Symbolic Power3. Law's Symbolic Power to Legitimize4. Symbolic Violence and Illegitimacy: The Political Uncanny5. The Symbolic Power and Violence of Legal Utterances6. The Legitimacy of the Family: Family Law and Gothic Fiction7. The Political Uncanny of the Family: Patricia Duncker's The Deadly Space Between and The Civil Partnership Act 20048. Legitimizing the Subject of Domestic Violence: Lesley Glaister's Honour Thy Father and Laws of the Household9. Resistance and Legitimacy10. Making the LawCommendation Quotes:"QuEma's work is an original and highly sophisticated contribution to the field of law and literature. It is extremely well written, clearly argued, and full of powerful and succinct critical analyses of legal and literary texts." - Desmond Manderson, College of Law, Australian National UniversityCommendation Quotes:"Power and Legitimacy confidently manipulates intellectually diverse and difficult sources, incorporating a vast canon of critical literature, to make an innovative argument about the nature of law and its relationship with legal subjects. QuEma's writing is elegant and sharp." - David Gurnham, Southampton Law School, University of SouthamptonPublisher Marketing: An interdisciplinary analysis of the ways in which symbolic acts create social norms, Power and Legitimacy is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on law and literature. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, Anne QuEma demonstrates the effect of symbolic violence on the creation of social and political legitimacy. Examining modern jurisprudence theory, statutory law, and the family within the modern Gothic novel, QuEma shows how the forms and effects of political power transform as one shifts from discourse to discourse. An impressive integration of the scholarship in these three fields, Power and Legitimacy is a thought-provoking analysis of the basis of power and the law.

Contributor Bio:  Qu?ma, Anne Anne QuEma is a professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University.