SOURCE: Dolin, Kieran. “The Modern Western Nomos.” In Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature, pp. 21-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Dolan explores the cultural and philosophical context which enabled a connection between literature and law in the post-Enlightenment European tradition.

The study of fictional representations of law demands a contextual criticism. In this chapter I attempt to establish this context for the subsequent analysis of my chosen novels by presenting a short account of the intellectual and social history of European law since the eighteenth century. The ultimate aim is not to supply a mere background for critical analysis, but to enable the novels themselves to be read as texts in the cultural history of the modern nomos. For Cover, every normative world is specific to the culture which gives birth to it. The “thickness of legal meaning” in...