Anne Quéma
Power and legitimacy: law, culture, and literatureUniversity of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2015,xiii, 359 pp.
ISBN: 9781442649033
An interdisciplinary analysis of the ways in which symbolic acts create social norms, Power and Legitimacy is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on law and literature. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, Anne Quéma demonstrates the effect of symbolic violence on the creation of social and political legitimacy.
Examining modern jurisprudence theory, statutory law, and the family within the modern Gothic novel, Quéma shows how the forms and effects of political power transform as one shifts from discourse to discourse. An impressive integration of the scholarship in these three fields, Power and Legitimacy is a thought-provoking analysis of the basis of power and the law.
Acknowledgments
IntroductionChapter I. Symbolic Power and Legitimacy
Chapter II. Social Poiesis and Symbolic PowerChapter III. Law’s Symbolic Power to Legitimize
Chapter IV. Symbolic Violence and Illegitimacy: The Political Uncanny
Chapter V. The Symbolic Power and Violence of Legal Utterances
Chapter VI. The Legitimacy of the Family: Family Law and Gothic Fiction
Chapter VII. The Political Uncanny of the Family: Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Betweenand the Civil Partnership Act 2004
Chapter VIII. Legitimizing the Subject of Domestic Violence: Lesley Glaister’s Honour Thy Father and Laws of the Household
Chapter IX. Resistance and Legitimacy
Chapter X. Making the Law
Notes
BibliographyIndex
Anne Quéma is a professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University