Chenxi Tang's Imagining World Order is an ambitious, wide-ranging book of the kind that is rarely written any more: an attempt to offer a systematic synthesis of the ways in which the emergence of public international law intersected and engaged with the distinctive generic shifts in early modern literature. Concatenating two entire disciplines—the intellectual history of international law and European literary history—to produce a “dual history” and explore points of conjunction and possible mutual impact is no small task. It significantly expands the scope of scholarship on law and literature and, in the process, usefully raises several methodological and conceptual challenges for the field.
Central to this ambition is the purpose of bringing law, particularly international law, into conversation with literary texts—a long-standing bass note (continuing theme in the field to which this book responds harmonically) in studies of law and literature. Is literature largely a cultural repository for representing, questioning, and imagining reforms to the law (understood in the widest sense), thus raising a mirror to the nature of legal process, custom and conundrum, or are there deeper conceptual similitudes between the ways that literary and legal texts work? Can we go beyond a shared basis in rhetoric and hermeneutics and open up more philosophic connections between these two kinds of texts whose ends are admittedly often very different?
Tang intervenes directly into this debate by presenting a parallelism that is especially intriguing. As he notes in his theoretically oriented introduction, public international law is, notoriously, a paradoxical, deficient law because it affirms state sovereignty yet lacks a higher authority for its own enforcement, depending instead on the pressure of legal norms for its adoption and application. In this sense, international law can be seen as an elaborate fiction in which states choose to participate; from the perspective of the literary critic or legal philosopher, international law is therefore a fascinating case of how powerful fictions can have real world effects. According to this reading, international law can even be seen as an instantiation of Shelley's dictum that the poets are the legislators of the world, a position that goes well beyond usual studies of law and literature.
Therefore, at the heart of Imagining World Order is a rich analogy between literary fiction making and legal fiction making and the various ways in which each operates. At the foundational moment of the emergence of international law, Tang argues that both law and literature actively drew from each other, or, in other words, there were underlying legal-philosophical questions that motivated changes in both legal and literary norms. Although this idea is suggestive and yields plenty of insights into an astonishing range of literary and legal texts, it also flounders sometimes on conceptual slipperiness: after all, legal norms and the norms of literary genre are not quite the same thing. The substantive introduction grapples with these dilemmas by attempting to categorize the interactions of international law and literature into four tendencies—poetic constitution, poetic lawmaking, poetic jurisdiction, and poetic contestation—and thereby brings together different methods for envisioning relations between legal and literary texts. In this, it provides a useful framework for future study, even though these categories are frequently overlapping and conceptually interlinked.
The book weaves between synthesis and argument to make its claims: arranged into six hefty chapters, it systematically lays out major thinkers and intellectual developments in the emergence of public international law alongside the rise and fall of particular literary genres, specifically Renaissance epic, baroque tragedy, political romance, and the rise of the novel. Chapter One traces the need for an international legal regime in the wake of the New World encounter through classic texts by Vitoria, Suarez, Gentili, and Grotius by using Camões's Os Lusiadas as a literary counterpoint. Chapters Two and Three consider law in a performative context, discussing a variety of visual media, and plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Lohenstein and Corneille. Interestingly here, Tang sidesteps the obvious discussion of Shakespeare's history plays, and considers instead the form of the tragicomedy in the late romances, building an intriguing bridge to Chapter Four, which focuses on the political romance. Perhaps surprisingly, Barclay's Argenis is the basis for the chapter, along with Herbert's Princess Cloria, and Ulrich's Aramena, while Leibniz as a reader of romance, who incorporates its providential world order into his Essais on Theodicy, makes for an elegant conclusion. Chapters Five and Six shift to a somewhat different argument: the claim that international law and literature begin to diverge near 1700 because of a shift between the public and private, the “depersonalized state” and the individual. Suffice it to say that this meta-narrative continues to be widely debated by both literary and intellectual historians, but here forms the basis of discussion of the consolidation of international law as a field of expertise versus the rise of the novel (largely in England and Germany), divided into three categories (commercial, sentimental, and cosmopolitan).
This summary does no justice at all to the incredible density of this book, which squeezes in references to many, many more texts and authors than there is room to note in an economical review. In its desire to tell a sweeping story of European law and literature, much is condensed and distilled. This is both the book's greatest strength and also its weakness: the reader will frequently quibble with generalizations, schematization, apparent omissions, and seemingly reductive claims. But such is the cost of writing a magisterial account. On the whole, observations about the broader conceptual affinities and engagements between the legal and literary arena are frequently persuasive, particularly in Chapters Two (on the public performance of international law across a range of media) and Four (on political romance). At the same time, the insistent, overarching impetus to find correspondences between the two discourses sometimes feels forced. This is a book that will be a starting point and required reading for anyone working on early modern international law and literature and will become a key resource. One hopes that it will also stimulate many more in-depth studies of particular moments in this long historical trajectory.
