In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions.

Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts-some highly canonical (Camoes, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering-engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period-its so-called classical age-in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.

About the Author

Chenxi Tang is Professor of German, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Geographic Imagination of Modernity.

Reviews

Adding to the growing body of work on law and literature, Tang (German, Univ. of California, Berkeley) offers a solid overview of the emergence and evolution of international law, and he argues plausibly that, lacking a supranational enforcement mechanism, international law depended on the poetic imagination to create an idea of world order.

* Choice *


Awards
Short-listed for Oscar Kenshur Book Prize 2019 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501716911
Author Chenxi Tang
Format Hardback
Page Count 360
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 30mm