Book review: DAVID GURNHAM, Memory, Imagination, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009, 230 pp., ISBN 9780754671039, £55 (hbk)
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Author | Haris Psarras |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639100190040702 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 19(4)
Sassen S (1999) Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and
Money. New York, NY: The New Press.
Venkatesh SA (2009) Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Douglas L Yearwood
North Carolina Criminal Justice Analysis Center
DAVID GURNHAM, Memory, Imagination, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature.
Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009, 230 pp., ISBN 9780754671039, £55 (hbk).
As a distinct interdisciplinary field ‘Law and Literature’ is still in the making. It is of
course true that since the early 1970s – it was by then that the idea of taking a closer look
at the bridge linking legal and literary texts started gaining ground in the academic world
– a large number of contributions have transformed Law and Literature from a marginal
research movement into a promising discipline. Yet one has the impression that Law and
Literature is still on the way to defining its research area. The questions that persist are,
what is the intersection between law and literature, and which strategies should we fol-
low to make the investigation of the claimed link between fiction writers and law-makers
fruitful for a deeper understanding of legal practices?
Books on Law and Literature are expected to shed some light on that question, if they
wish to be rewarding to their readers. In this respect David Gurnham’s Memory, Imagi-
nation, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature is a particularly gratifying book.
Indeed, taking the subtitle of the book seriously, Gurnham not only locates non-ordinary
points of intersection between old literary themes and legal concepts, but also makes our
reading of current controversial legal issues more sophisticated.
Gurnham suggests that what makes the legal and the literary discourse relevant to each
other is primarily the fact that they both engage with moral issues, namely with people’s
moral concerns in highly controversial settings. Furthermore, he claims that the two
discourses are similar at a deeper level. In their effort to suggest a way out from cru-
cial dilemmas, human conflicts and suffering, they articulate conceptions of justice
through recourse to the same human faculties, memory and imagination. This idea
offers the common thread that holds the eight chapters of the book together; the inter-
section between law and literature is due to the fact that they both put forward narra-
tives of justice (p. 8) by exploiting the inspiring potential of memory and imagination
(p. 1).
It is actually to such an...
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