Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction

Marco Wan is Associate Professor of Law and Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong.

• 1. Introduction: Legal Interpretation, Gender and the Novel2. The Madame Bovary Trial: Androgyny and Realism’s ‘Lascivious Painting’3. The Charlot s’amuse Trial: Masturbation and the Scandal of Naturalist Fiction in France4. The Henry Vizetelly Trials: Patricide and Obscene French Novels in England5. The Oscar Wilde Trials: The Sodomite, ‘Literary’ Evidence and ‘Legal’ Interpretation6. The Well of Loneliness Trials: Lesbianism, Male Homosexuality and the Return of the Repressed.

`Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction offers a new and striking contribution to the subject of censorship and the trials of literary texts. The subject has often been treated without Marco Wan’s great subtlety as a reader. He has a remarkable capacity to read the language deployed by the law with the keen critical attention of the literary critic, and then to see how legal issues inflect the modalities of literature. His attention to the discourses of gender implicated in these famous trials gives his study a striking originality. This is one of the best studies of law and literature in intertextual relation that I have ever seen.'Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Yale University, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar, Princeton University`It is the task of literature to call people back to the radical diversity of forms of life, and modes of desire. Ranging over narratives of the sodomitical, patricidal, onanistic, androgyne, gay and lesbian, Marco Wan’s eloquent and incisive study brilliantly evidences the capacity of the literary to challenge, unsettle and rewrite the strictures of the juridical.'Peter Goodrich, Professor and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law `Neither before nor since have I written to congratulate an author unknown to me. But I did so in response to an article by Marco Wan on the Oscar Wilde trial, now addressed more fully in Chapter Four of this book. " Fascinating " was what I said. Indeed there is no better word to describe Marco's analysis here of five famous examples of where the establishment desperately resorts to law in order to confront home truths about human sexuality which it regards as socially subversive.'Nicholas Wilson, Justice of the U.K. Supreme Court.