Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature

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Cambridge University Press, 2002 M01 24 - 299 pages
Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkably original book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature. Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: American literature History and criticism, Law in literature, Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896 Views on slavery, African Americans in literature, Citizenship in literature, Slavery in literature, Racism in literature, Law and literature, Race in literature.

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Contents

Higher law in the 185os
12
The look of higher law Harriet Beecher Stowes antislavery ftction
56
Cosmopolitan constitutionalism Emerson and Douglass
87
The positivist alternative
131
Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey citizenship and the flux of contract
183
Notes
223
Index
293
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Page 5 - Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?

About the author (2002)

Gregg Crane is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University. He has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1986. He has published in American Literary History, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.

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