The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley's famous phrase "the legislator of the world", it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness." DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique. This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, 'Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.' DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique.
This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.