Anne Quéma
Power and legitimacy: law, culture, and literature
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2015,xiii, 359 pp.
ISBN: 9781442649033
An interdisciplinary analysis of the ways in which symbolic acts create
social norms, Power and Legitimacy is an important contribution to the
growing body of scholarship on law and literature. Drawing on the theoretical
insights of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, Anne Quéma demonstrates the
effect of symbolic violence on the creation of social and political legitimacy.
Examining modern jurisprudence theory, statutory law, and the family
within the modern Gothic novel, Quéma shows how the forms and effects of
political power transform as one shifts from discourse to discourse. An
impressive integration of the scholarship in these three fields, Power and
Legitimacy is a thought-provoking analysis of the basis of power and the
law.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter I. Symbolic
Power and Legitimacy
Chapter II. Social
Poiesis and Symbolic Power
Chapter III. Law’s
Symbolic Power to Legitimize
Chapter IV. Symbolic
Violence and Illegitimacy: The Political Uncanny
Chapter V. The
Symbolic Power and Violence of Legal Utterances
Chapter VI. The
Legitimacy of the Family: Family Law and Gothic Fiction
Chapter VII. The
Political Uncanny of the Family: Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between
and the Civil Partnership Act 2004
Chapter VIII. Legitimizing
the Subject of Domestic Violence: Lesley Glaister’s Honour Thy Father and Laws of the Household
Chapter IX. Resistance
and Legitimacy
Chapter X. Making
the Law
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Anne Quémais a professor in the Department of
English and Theatre at Acadia University
