The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire

Fleishman, Avrom; GoGwilt, Christopher

doi:10.2307/3200886

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Fleishman observes,`If such mutual mystification is the law of life among the forces of legality, how unstable must be the basis of social order.' 97 As a result, Conrad's portrayal of the police questions the credibility of police-based security; the end of the police plot and the rest of the novel only serve to dispel it completely.…”

Section: `The Defensive Mandate Of a Menaced Society' 82 ± Uncertaimentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing

Skinner

2003

Journal of Law and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of law in literature stimulates critical reflection about law and the limits of its institutions by expanding contextual analysis to include the emotive discourses of fiction. This article starts from the premisses that the orthodox separation of literary expression from social scientific writing is not immutable and that different temporal settings are not barriers to exploring themes that traverse them. It uses Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a story of policing and anarchism in late nineteenth-century London, in order to discuss the limits of policing today. This novel is read in parallel with two modern police studies to show how it prefigures current concerns, portraying policing as an imperfect totem of security, immaterial to the individual's emotional crises, which, by extension, can be seen to illustrate the limits of law itself. This article thus raises methodological and theoretical issues of general interest to the study of law in society and suggests how reading literature can`thicken' legal analysis by offering experience of the emotional beyond that law ignores.

show abstract

Section: `The Defensive Mandate Of a Menaced Society' 82 ± Uncertaimentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing

Skinner

2003

Journal of Law and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing

‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About