A brief account of law and literature (and thereby of the present volume)

This chapter presents an introductory account of law and literature. Richard Weisberg calls law and literature “our culture’s two most central narrative endeavours”. Weisberg is an important figure in a movement, a systematic yet internally contested attempt to understand the fullness of, or delimit, as the case may be, the relations between law and literature. A few key books tend to come up in most accounts of law and literature, and the one that most often is taken as inaugural is James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, first published in 1973. Richard A. Posner criticizes White for drawing on literature without explicitly legal subject matter. For Posner law and literature is focused largely on literature about lawyers and trials. Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler outline four common approaches to law and literature: historical; typological; emphasizing sameness and/or differences; and focused on audience.