Daniela Carpi Bücher

Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.

Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.

The latest development concerning the metaphorical use of the fairy tale is the legal perspective. The law had and has recourse to fairy tales in order to speak of the nomos and its subversion, of the politically correct and of the various means that have been used to enforce the law. Fairy tales are a fundamental tool to examine legal procedures and structures in their many failings and errors. Therefore, we have privileged the term „fables“ of the law just to stress the ethical perspective: they are moral parables that often speak of justice miscarried and justice sought. Law and jurists are creators of „fables“ on the view that law is born out of the facts (ex facto ius oritur) so that there is a need for narrative coherence both on the level of the case and the level of legislation (or turned the other way around: what does it mean if no such coherence is found?). This is especially of interest given the influx of all kinds of new technologies that are „fabulous“ in themselves and hard to incorporate in traditional doctrinal schemes and thus in the construction of a new reality.

Diaspora Studies have emerged to study the changing patterns of global migration and home making. This volume offers new perspectives on this highly relevant field of research by integrating both legal and literary aspects, questions and methodologies in the study of diasporas and migration.

In what ways do we look at the fairy tale and its tradition today? Originally an oral narrative based on formulaic repetitions, the fairy tale allows the contemporary writer to be at play with tradition, through a recovering of the canons and formulas of the classical tales that is experimental and ever changing. Fairy-tale readers make personal use of it, resorting for manipulations and rewritings that serve their own specific needs. The expansion of the fairy tale shows its endless literary evolution thanks to the monumentalisation of the written word, hence the necessity for the literary fairy tale to die, in order to be reborn as literary play. By absorbing its oral antecedents, the rewriting of the tale of wonder establishes itself as a renovated narrative that continually proves effective in the reconstitution and reaffirmation of human consciousness.

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the „and“ of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

In recent years, the well-established field of human anthropology has been put under scrutiny by the new data offered by science and technology. Scientific intervention into human life through organ transplants, euthanasia, genetic engineering, experiments connected to the genetic code and the genome, and varied other biotechnologies have placed ethical beliefs into question and created ethical dilemmas. These scientific inventions influence our views on birth and death, on the construction of the body and its technical reproducibility, and have problematized the concept of the human persona. The purpose of bioethics, the science of life, is to find new values and norms which will be valid for a multicultural society. Bioethics is, today, a well-respected topic of research that has brought together philosophers and experts to discuss the limits of science and medicine. The aim of this book is to merge the two fields of bioethics and law (or biolaw) through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived. The new meaning of the term ‘persona’ represents in fact the final point of a long-standing quest for man's sense of his own being and human dignity, and of his capacity to live in social interrelations. The volume presents a wide range of perspectives, comprising methodological approaches, legal and literary aspects.

The present volume stems from our previous research on The Concept of Equity: A Diachronical Assessment (2007). The essays in this new collection demonstrate how lively and active the debate on equity has been and how difficult it is to find a concluding word on this topic. In literature a new idea concerning equity is slowly being shaped. The discourse offered by literature is of an alternative kind; we are reminded of the utopian function of equity in Plato's Republic, where it aims at transcending reality and the mimetic description of it. There is something mysterious about equity: we cannot grasp it easily in terms of rational argumentation. It is all about norm and its inversion; at the same time it is deconstructive. Thus sometimes equity appears to be beyond the sphere of reality and takes us into a mysterious and incomprehensible world.

Equity is a multifaceted concept encompassing law, philosophy, morality, economics, and social sciences. Historically, it has been closely linked to justice, often seen as synonymous with ideal justice. When norms are rigidly applied, they can fail to achieve true justice in specific cases. This volume examines the historical and comparative dimensions of equity in English and German law and literature, highlighting two key points: interest in equity as a principle of justice intensifies during periods of rapid change, and the challenges in defining a stable concept of equity stem from its reliance on subjective criteria. The literary realm reflects how European literatures engage with ethical debates, the complexities of equity, and the pursuit of shared ethics. By integrating law with literary and economic discourse from a European perspective, this work aims to broaden the understanding of equity and its relevance to the intricate dynamics of contemporary societies.

If some philosopher or thinker has been very seminal, the spread and development of his ideas never ends, but goes on speaking to later ages. A particular thought can take possession of a particular age because it may have been latent in a sort of half-developed instinct of the human mind itself. This is what has happened to Plato in the twentieth century. The aim of this volume is to demonstrate how, even within the formal and ideological disruptions of the twentieth century, a strong connection with the classical cultural past runs through the whole period. Even if the postmodern age presents an agonistic struggle against tradition, ironising it, deconstructing and parodying it, still the cultural pivots that sustain the whole fabric of the period are deeply rooted in the classical past. If Eliot speaks of the historical sense and of the fragments of tradition that must be shored against the contemporary ruins, these conceptions are the leading factors of the whole twentieth century.