Description: The Civil War, Reconstruction and the post-war Amendments revolutionized American intellectual life, compelling new discussions of inequality and difference. Legal Realisms explores how a new kind of American novel emerged in relation to contemporary aesthetic, legal, and political debates about the meaning of social representation in literature and public life.
Review Quotes: "This book is essential reading for any scholar of American realism. It also adds an important voice to the legal and political history of postbellum America, which cannot be adequately understood without understanding the project of perspectival realism championed by Howells and taken up by the writers of his day." -- David Sumner, American Political Thought
"In a wonderfully original close reading, Holbo situates Twain's novel simultaneously within antebellum laws concerning navigable watercraft, guardianship, majority, and slavery and within the post-Reconstruction judicial settlement. In Holbo's adept hands, Huckleberry Finn becomes, at once, an allegory of law's origins, a meditation on jurisdiction as definitive of rights, and a meta literary reckoning of the unfinished business of freedom in the wake of the sentimental politics of emancipation." -- Jeannine DeLombard, New England Quarterly"It is her final chapter on Huckleberry Finn, the most canonical of canonical American novels that produces her most electrifying insights into the period and its literature...she manages at once to convey the dynamic intersection of legal and literary realisms that is her theoretical focus and to transform our micro understanding of the most discussed novel in American literature. The aerial view and a meticulous attention to textual detail coincide in her discussion of Twain's masterpiece to produce something special in literary criticism." -- Henry B. Wonham, American Literary History