The Criminal in Gothic Fiction and Contemporary Law

This book transports prevailing criminal legal problems back to their Gothic origins at the close of the nineteenth century.

The Victorian fin-de-siècle was an age of both innovation and repression; a time when industry and empire alike worked to categorise, commodify, and control. It was a time in which law, literature, and the sciences were enmeshed in the gritty business of unpeeling the connections between minds and bodies, impulses, and actions. The era spun concepts and spurred conversations that remain at the forefront of discussions around who we are and who we could be, right through to this very moment. Centring its analysis around three iconic novels from the era – Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Stoker’s Dracula – this book considers how these immortal novels live on in our cultural imagination and provide vivid materials that can be used to more deeply understand how current criminal legal problems have mutated and evolved. Like the characters in such Gothic novels, the law creates and is haunted by its own doubles: the reasonable person, the compelled confessor, the career criminal. As well as producing interdisciplinary readings of literary and legal texts, this book develops a new typology of literary doubles intended to assist scholars engaging with themes of responsibility and legal fault. Itself an elusive figure of paradox and contradiction, the literary double is our ideal guide through the law’s Gothic hinterland.

This original and compelling study will appeal to scholars and students of law and literature, criminal law, legal history, and those intrigued by the things that go bump in the night.