The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of PossessionUniversity of Chicago Press, 15. maj 2010 - 376 sider In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. Best also argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, Best helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, The Fugitive's Properties sets new agendas for scholars of American literature and legal culture. |
Indhold
1 | |
Chapter One Fugitive Sound Fungible Personhood Evanescent Property | 27 |
Chapter Two The Fugitives Properties Uncle Toms Incalculable Dividend | 99 |
Chapter Three Counterfactuals Causation and the Tenses of Separate but Equal | 201 |
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The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best Ingen forhåndsvisning - 2004 |
Almindelige termer og sætninger
abstraction aesthetic Amendment appears authority autopoesis blackface body cakewalk Cambridge capital causation century Chicago cinema claim clause common law conception Constitution contract corporation counterfactual credit economy culture doctrine Dred Scott duden economic equal protection Essays exchange expression fiction figure film Fourteenth Amendment Fugitive Slave Fugitive Slave Law Harriet Beecher Stowe Holmes imagination intellectual property interest Jeremy Bentham Justice labor language Law Review law's literary logic matter means ment metaphor metonymy minstrel moral musical narrative natural Negro nineteenth-century object Oliver Wendell Holmes original Oxford passion person personhood play Plessy political principle production property law property rights race racial rational relation repetition reprint rhetoric sentiment slavery social specific speculative Stanley Fish Stowe Stowe's theft theory thing tion Tom’s Topsy Tourgée trans transformation translation turn-of-the-century U.S. Supreme Court Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press words York