Introduction : Legal tangles and gothic trappings -- Things are not as they should be : the legal system in William Godwin's Caleb Williams -- Questioning the evidence of bodies and texts in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Reading unreadable texts and bodies : Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly -- Slave narrative and the gothic novel : Hannah Crafts's the Bondwoman's narrative -- Closing arguments
Tracing the use of legal themes in the gothic novel, Bridget M. Marshall shows novelists like William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hannah Crafts questioning the foundations of the Anglo-American justice system. Often invoking actual laws like the Black Act in England or the Fugitive Slave Act in America, gothic novels connect the genre's fantastic horrors with much more shocking examples of terror and injustice like American slavery
