Date: Friday 26 May 2017
Time: 4.10–5.30pm
Venue: Napier LG23, The University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide.
Enquiries: Jacquie Bennett (jacquie.bennett@adelaide.edu.au)
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William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) plays a crucial role in Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel, Armadale (1866), where it operates as an obstacle to romantic desire, standing against romance and love, even against sensation itself. This essay interprets Collins’ critique of Blackstone as directive, rather than descriptive, taking seriously the novelistic question: Is there no love in Blackstone? By examining various 'zones of desire' and 'zones of disgust', first in Blackstone’s poetry and then in the Commentaries, the essay unpacks Blackstone’s reliance on these twinned emotions as instrumental to his efforts to construct a new version of the English common law. Oriental despotism and marriage law are interrelated here, as desire and disgust worked together in the Commentaries to invent an English legal tradition that could accommodate the forces of commodification and expansion that defined modernity.
Kathryn Temple JD, PhD, Associate Professor and former Chair of the English Department at Georgetown University, is currently completing a book on legal emotions in the eighteenth century and today, entitled Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England. She works at the interaction of the history of emotion and institutional structures. Her next book, about the relationship between narratives of survival and neoliberalism, is entitled Culture of Survival.
Image: William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: 2, The Tête à Tête, 1753. © The National Gallery, London.