ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the innovative and path-breaking scholarship. It explores the ways in which literature comments upon, and/or critiques theories deemed central to legal philosophy, to jurisprudence. The book also focuses on how the novel represents the juridical imaginary's legal theories. It suggests how this novelistic rendering of legal theories complicates, challenges, and calls the juridical imaginary to account. The chapter describes a novel legal theory of the novel as legal theory. Judgements is doing something else; specifically, exploring, through a genre-, period-, and jurisdiction-specific study of literature, the literary contribution to the historical construction of the nineteenth-century's legal mindset – what might be called, its 'juridical imaginary'. The book shows that a new template for justice lies with one of the more modest, less front-and-centre characters in the novel: in Joe Gargery and his ethics of friendship.
