ABSTRACT
The law and literature movement arose out of and in conjunction with other ways of seeing law outside of narrowly legal parameters and has in turn led to broader interdisciplinary engagements with the law. The latter part of the twentieth century was a great age of cultural theory. A range of theoretical approaches from philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and political economy were brought to bear on the understanding of all areas of the humanities, especially literature, and social sciences, law included. Modes of cultural theory became a lingua franca for cross-disciplinary understanding. Prominent among theoretical approaches for understanding law were Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction. Marxist theory retains force as a critique of capitalism. As such, it takes a much less sanguine view of law than other theories do. The study of law and literature might be focused on those areas of law that most directly and most prominently have an impact on the field of literary activity: copyright and censorship.
