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InReconstituting Authority,William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority. Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process. He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions. The first half of the book is devoted in separate chapters to William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Pauline Hopkins. The focus shifts from large theoretical concerns to questions of contract and native sovereignty, to issues of African American citizenship and racial entitlement. In each case the discussion is rooted in a larger consideration of the rule (or misrule) of law.The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser,Reconstituting Authorityreveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.

In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority.Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process. He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions.The first half of the book is devoted in separate chapters to William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Pauline Hopkins. The focus shifts from large theoretical concerns to questions of contract and native sovereignty, to issues of African American citizenship and racial entitlement. In each case the discussion is rooted in a larger consideration of the rule (or misrule) of law.The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, Reconstituting Authority reveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.

Edith Wharton's \"The House of Mirth\" is discussed. The novel's central conflicts center around home, marriage and legal rights of privacy.

[...] much of his fiction not only registers his disagreement with Washington's panacea of property ownership, but also questions the efficacy of pursuing formally equal rights within a legal system that associates the black self only with absence and dispossession. When we read the novel along with the short fiction that Chesnutt published at the turn of the century, however, its emphasis on blood and genealogy begins to look less like a capitulation to biological definitions of race and more like an exploration of the connection between race and property. Appealing to \"the court of public opinion\" - a concept charged with both legal and extralegal implications - Chesnutt hopes to build narratives more durable than Solomon's sway-backed house; narratives that move toward establishing the terms of a legal regime that valorizes the boundary lines of property and rights but, in recognizing the \"value\" of blackness as well as of whiteness, effectively erases those of race.

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers.

This chapter contains sections titled: Law in the Postbellum Era Law, Narrative, and Power Narratives of Civil Rights Narratives of Women's Rights

In an essay entitled “ Police Report” that appeared in the January 1882 edition of theAtlantic, William Dean Howells describes paying two visits to what he calls a “police court”—a Boston court that summarily disposed of minor criminal offenses. Howells does not specify the dates of his attendance, stating only that the first occurred during summer and the second took place “nearly a year later” (“Police” 12). It seems likely, however, that he visited the courtroom either shortly before or during his work onA Modern Instance—most of which he wrote in 1881—and the novel’s legal

My epigraphs from Emerson may seem out of place in a book that concentrates on American fiction published between 1880 and 1920. Yet in attempting to describe the contours of legal and literary authority in American culture, I find myself formulating two narratives—one that ends with Emerson, and one that begins with him. The first of these stories is the subject of Robert A. Ferguson’sLaw and Letters in American Culture, a study that compellingly recounts the growth of a liaison between the legal and literary spheres in the United States beginning with the Revolution, and the decline of