Law, literature and intertextuality

Abstract

Most of the contemporary scholarships of both literature and law categorize the coincidences and overlaps between an author's literary work and his or her legal career, a given literary period and the same historical era of law and jurisprudence or between innumerable pieces of literature and the texts of the law merely as things of no real interest, curious facts that are not worthy of detailed academic analysis. While a point of view of this kind has its reasons the aim of the following paper is to change this attitude to a certain extent. In my opinion instead of talking about the "death of law and literature" we should consider the possibilites of (re)opening new ways of research for law and literature studies that may provide mutual benefits to both the representatives of legal and literary sciences. Hereinafter I will try to show why and how exploring the intertextual connections between the texts of law and those of literature seems to me the most fruitful endeavour to connect law and literature to each other. © 2011 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.