The opening chapter outlines how reflective narratives can elucidate and extend existing conceptualisations of transitional justice goals. It traces the characteristics of historical, legal and creative narratives about the war and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the different meanings these narratives have given to violence and its aftermath. Here reflective narratives – produced slowly in and through the arts and law – emerge as stories that imagine or help imagine futures different to the present. The chapter introduces the entanglement of the methods of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ in this book. It also locates the arts and law in the field of transitional justice, arguing for the need to understand core goals from new perspectives that account for the interdisciplinarity of the field and for the inclusion of non-participatory arts in knowledge production. The chapter closes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 adds a further theoretical dimension, making connections between the relevance-theoretic notion of interpretive use and the concept of metarepresentation from evolutionary psychology. Metarepresentation is the capacity to represent other representations, for example, to think about thoughts or utterances, and in this sense interpretive use is a public and communicative version of metarepresentation. The ability to understand other minds – known as theory of mind – is a related metarepresentational capacity which humans develop from an early age. Metarepresentation is related to other adaptive cognitive activities such as pretend play and simulation. These activities are decoupled from thoughts held as beliefs and are useful in various ways. The ability to engage in these activities is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation which confers advantage for humans. This chapter argues that the creation of fiction and the creation of narrative and character voices offer exercise for metarepresentational capacities in complex, embedded and extended ways. The chapter is largely theoretical, but the argument is supported with brief reference to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. This novel illustrates the idea of metarepresentation in a number of ways, including the ironic representation of characters’ thoughts and a broader parodic representation of Gothic fiction.

Chapter 2 considers the nature of literary communication from the perspective of relevance theory. The starting point is the assumption that in reading literature we operate using the same principles as we use in the understanding of everyday utterances. Literary communication is not distinct from ‘ordinary’ communication. At the same time, there are some circumstances and features which are characteristic of literature, though not exclusive to it. These are the foci of this chapter. It begins by discussing the historical and cultural distance between authors and readers, and how this distance is negotiated in the reading of literary texts. The chapter then attends to the relevance theoretic view that poetic effects are achieved via the exploration of a range of weak implicatures. Metaphor is related to other uses of language such as hyperbole via the idea that language can represent thought loosely, and ad hoc concepts are constructed routinely in interpretation. Irony, similarly, is related to other uses of language such as quoting or attributing, using the relevance theoretic notion of interpretive use. Finally the chapter suggests that fiction itself is a kind of speculative interpretive use. The topics discussed here are expanded on in the chapters which follow.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, although almost entirely unknown for the first seven decades of the twentieth century, can be read as the inaugural text in a tradition of literary fiction about white women in New Orleans who enjoy relatively privileged class affiliations but who nonetheless struggle – with mixed results, if any – against a male-dominated society and the insidious resilience of its multifaceted networks of oppression. Shirley Ann Grau’s The House on Coliseum Street (1961), among Grau’s nine other books of fiction, is a summit of this legacy, and paved the way for Ellen Gilchrist’s fourteen collections of short stories and seven novels.

This chapter pays close attention to two stories from Simin Daneshvar’s 1961 collection Shahri Chun Behesht (A City Like Paradise), reading “Vakil Bazaar” and “The Playhouse” as modernist “rehearsals” of racist archetypes, representing a literary-historical moment when socially progressive Iranian writers were just starting to situate their work within global discourses of antiracism and contending with problematic historical legacies in theater and narrative. Briefly summarized, the chapter takes into account, first, a “child-snatcher” character accused of Jewish blood libel against Muslims (associated by the child narrator with both her lower-class nanny and with the self-flagellation of Ashura), and second, an actor whose blackface performance signifies lowbrow humor and a lack of inhibitions. Ostby examines these isolated incidents in Daneshvar as a kind of prism onto a larger modernist moment, marked by socialist class struggle and women’s rights initiatives, but also racial purity discourse. Her readings trace where uses of metaphor and allegory we might consider “modernist” aesthetics in Daneshvar’s work obscure or even actively prevent the social critique associated with “modernist” politics.

This chapter examines Martin Amis’s examination of fame and celebrity through selections of his non-fiction and fiction. I position these discussions within a framework of what James English refers to as ‘cultural capital’ with its own ‘economies of prestige’. Central to this chapter is my argument that the spectator–performer relationship is akin to that of the author–reader relationship, both inhabiting a nexus to achieve synergetic gratification.

Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

Chapter 5 focuses on responsibility as an ethical category in a newly articulated political community. Drawing from the intellectual and political work of Bengali writer Syed Waliullah, this chapter offers an analysis of his existential call to freedom in the service of a new postcolonial subjectivity. Canonized on both sides of post-partitioned Bengal, Waliullah’s oeuvre – fiction, drama, short stories, essays and paintings – though composed almost entirely abroad, draws on the land and landscapes of rural Bengal, as it does on certain paradigms of existential philosophy; his protagonists, for example, are wracked by a singular and terrible sense of responsibility. How might we understand this complex negotiation beyond the most basic ascriptions of belatedness and mimicry? Because he was based in Paris for most of his life after government posts in England, Germany, Indonesia, and Australia, I suggest self-translation, as a larger philosophical venture and as a way to understand a metaphysical or existential line of questioning in this work. In the process, we see that both “situation” and “responsibility” become newly imbued with meaning in the context of a rural, postcolonial Bengal.

The Macedonian dynasty, wonderfully rooted in murder, having been renewed by violence as a peaceful, orderly, administration, a soldier-emperor is installed: Constantine IX, the main subject of the Chronographia, and its potential stumbling block. To deal with his own self-division towards Constantine, Psellos creates an elaborate structure of genres and disciplines – panegyric and history, rhetoric and philosophy – and conflicting roles for himself, to dramatize an odi et amo in which the comic and the tragic infuse each other in continuously changing ways. The effect is exhilating, shocking, and ingeniously balanced, as Psellos sets the failure of an indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) and his own moral degeneration against the expansive power of panegyric vested in this emperor. For good artistic reasons, Psellos omits the patriarch Keroularios and his attack on Psellos’ orthodoxy, projecting his own displacement onto a highly fictional portrayal of another character. The reign of Theodora, however, is vitiated by his repressed anger with Keroularios, ranting against his proxies in her government. The two reigns exemplify the work’s uneven quality.

This chapter addresses the ethical and legal dimensions of malleable persuasions, focusing on William Godwin’s and William Wordsworth’s responses to the rise of probabilism, specifically the new allowance in English law courts for circumstantial evidence, or narratives that connected causes to effects in plausible ways. As such evidence in the 1790s became subject to abuse, Godwin and Wordsworth came to share a concern with how plausibility might instead serve the cause of justice. In Things as They Are, Godwin draws on Cicero to show how the use of another’s words as evidence can either intensify persuasion or call it into question, thus breaking with his insistence on unvarnished truth and rationality in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Wordsworth in The Borderers explores the ambivalences of plausibility in the thirteenth-century borderland between England and Scotland, where individual judgment carried the weight of legal conviction. Wordsworth’s imagination of a miscarriage of justice comes to share with Godwin’s novel a sense of the value of eschewing rigid convictions when grounds are wanting, even as it attests to their powerful appeal.

This chapter examines Jane Austen’s interest in the circumstantial character of judgment in the context of courtship. It argues that across the gamut of Austen’s works, we see a marked change in the representation of persuasion and the ideal marriage of minds. Discussion of her teenage writings establishes her familiarity with, and dissent from, the cultural valorization of unwavering conviction. The chapter then considers her ironic portrayals of the triumph of such conviction in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, and her depiction of its shortcomings in Mansfield Park. By contrast, in Pride and Prejudice and Emma, it is argued, Austen makes significant allowances for the value of disagreement among the open-minded, while in Persuasion she engages most directly with the contingent and relative qualities of judgment that make good quarrels a personal and communal imperative, resulting in a wholly new valence for the title term.

In the 1820s, newspapers, religious tracts, pamphlets, magazines, and books became available in vast, affordable quantities to Americans across all classes. This print revolution occurred because of expanding literacy rates, new industrial technologies for mass production, population growth, new transportation modes for wider distribution, and the new Jacksonian ideology of populist democracy. Fiction became especially popular in book form and serialized in magazines and newspapers. After the Civil War, the publishing industry consolidated, and an efficient, interlocked network of syndicates, subscription sales, and door-to-door salesmen popularized the leading authors of the day. Perhaps more germane to the “democratizing” role of nineteenth-century publishing were the penny press and the dime novel. Each offered newspapers or books for cheap prices, making their literature available to urban working classes. This rich, diverse volume of nineteenth-century print culture established the dynamics of American popular culture.