Bøker av Lyndsey Stonebridge

"In the months after Donald Trump's election, Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism crashed onto the Amazon bestseller lists. "Never has our future been more unpredictable," she had written in the preface to the first edition in 1951, "never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries." With an uncannily accurate prescience, Arendt's dark history of her times seemed to be describing the insanity of our own. Arendt would've recognized the extremes of the twenty-first century from her own: the disenchantment with politics; the rise of conspiracy theories; self-censorship; powerlessness; tyranny and occupation, the climate catastrophe, the banality of evil. She had lived through it already. Born in the first decade of the last century, just before it lurched into war, she escaped Fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential-and controversial-public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Hannah Arendt wrote, and thought, in order to engage directly with the political chaos of her time. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. Her approach was to change the world by examining it unflinchingly, and not simply to criticise and protest. It is this defiance that attracts so many to her work today"--

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents a new way to think about the relationship between literature and human rights that challenges the idea that empathy inspires action.

'In the destructive element immerse.' These words from Joseph Conrad's Stein in Lord Jim cast a shadow over twentieth-century literature. At the same time, Freud's bleak prognosis of culture's discontents left a psychoanalysis with a legacy that found one of its most profound realisations in the play-rooms of British child psychoanalysis. In this book, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a new perspective on the history of our fascination with culture's discontents by returning to British psychoanalysis and second-wave modernism.

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after NurembergReturning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, The Judicial Imagination, argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times. Key Features* Returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma* Provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights* Offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities* Makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.