The Judicial Imagination

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in 1940s British Culture (Palgrave, 2007); The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (Macmillan, 1998) and the co-editor (with Marina Mackay) of British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Palgrave, 2006) and (with John Phillips) of Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998).

Introduction; Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma; Part One: Writing After Nuremberg; Chapter One: 'An event that did not become an experience': Rebecca West's Nuremberg; Chapter Two: The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt's Irony; Chapter Three: Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark's Idiom of Judgement; Part Two: Territorial Rights; Chapter Four: 'We Refugees': Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights; Chapter Five: 'Creatures of an Impossible Time': Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen; Chapter Six: The Dark Background of Difference: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch; Bibliography.

Stonebridge eloquently addresses a dilemma at the heart of the judicial imagination--the tension between law and poetic justice, traumatic history that resists comprehension and the ethical testimony of literature. -- Mary Jacobus, Professor of English, University of Cambridge 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, traumatic history that resists comprehension and the ethical testimony of literature. 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.