Franziska Quabeck Knihy

Exploring the intersection of legal principles and literary expression, this book delves into how literature reflects and critiques legal systems. It examines various genres and works, analyzing how authors incorporate legal themes and concepts into their narratives. Through a multidisciplinary lens, the collection highlights the ways literature can influence legal thought and vice versa, offering insights into the moral and ethical dimensions of law. This unique focus enriches the understanding of both fields, making it a valuable resource for scholars and enthusiasts alike.

'Not I - Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition' takes a closer look at how Ishiguro's narrators deal with their metaphorical 'parents', their literary ancestors from Hamlet to Alfred Prufrock. Ishiguro's narrators unwittingly express a metafictional concern about their existence in the shadows of English literary history and struggle with an imagined pressure to compete with iconic literary characters. This book traces their narrative anxiety against a variety of other canonical intertexts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and T. S. Eliot and takes a closer look at the narrators' narrative strategy of repression. Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, they all would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed through the carefully falsified construction of their stories. These narrators are never fully in control of their own narratives and so they inadvertently betray their own struggle for recognition.

John Locke's account of natural law, which forms the very basis of his political philosophy, has troubled many critics over time. The two works that shed light on Locke's theory are the early Essays on the Law of Nature and the Second Treatise of Government, published over 20 years later. Many critics have assumed that the early work presents a voluntarist approach to natural law and the second a rationalist approach, but the present analysis in this book shows that Locke's theory is consistent. Both works present a concept of the law of nature that must be placed between voluntarism and rationalism. (Series: Polyptoton. Munster Collection, Academic Writings / Polyptoton. Munsteraner Sammlung Akademischer Schriften - Vol. 3)

The concept of the just war poses one of the most important ethical questions to date. Can war ever be justified and, if so, how? When is a cause of war proportional to its costs and who must be held responsible? The monograph Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare demonstrates that the necessary moral evaluation of these questions is not restricted to the philosophical moral and political discourse. This analysis of Shakespeare's plays, which focuses on the histories, tragedies and Roman plays in chronological order, brings to light that the drama includes an elaborate and complex debate of the ethical issues of warfare. The plays that feature in this analysis range from Henry VI to Coriolanus and they are analysed according to the three Aquinian principles of legitimate authority, just cause and right intention. Also extending the principles of analysis to more modern notions of responsibility, proportionality and the jus in bello-presupposition, this monograph shows that just war theory constitutes a dominant theoretical approach to war in the Shakespearean canon.