© Columbia University Press
The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg
August, 2011
Cloth, 224 pages, 2 b+w illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4235-9
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00
This book provides a new theorization of the relation between law and trauma.
Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces the emergence of a critical aesthetics of judgment in a group of writers – often hard to place in the 'between' of modernism and contemporary writing – including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Martha Gellhorn.
From Nuremberg to the Eichmann trial, and from the Paris Peace Conference to attempts to legislate for the world's newly stateless through the discourse of human rights, Stonebridge shows that these ethically driven women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of historical justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims.