{"product_id":"human-rights-inc-the-world-novel-narrative-form-and-international-law-9780823228188","title":"Human Rights  Inc.: The World Novel  Narrative Form  and International Law","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this timely study of the historical  ideological  and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights  Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights law are related phenomena.  Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman  the novel of coming of age  fills out this image  offering a conceptual vocabulary  a humanist social vision  and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality.  Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature  Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law  naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law  the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself.  This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethes Wilhelm Meister  Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism  neoimperalism  humanitarianism  and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.  Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literatureimperatives that  today more than ever  are intertwined.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647275655221,"sku":"ByrdShop_0823228185","price":34.8,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780823228188.jpg?v=1781691449","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/human-rights-inc-the-world-novel-narrative-form-and-international-law-9780823228188","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}