Greta Olson, From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect

For many US-based scholars of US literature, heightened professional and personal precarity now characterizes their lives.Sources like UCLA Law's Critical Race Theory Forward Project, the ACLU's anti-LGBTQ tracker, and Pen America's Index of School Book Bans have documented a surge in official actions marginalizing already vulnerable populations.What is the value of literary scholarship in this fraught time?Greta Olson's new monograph reconceptualizing law and literature suggests an answer.Olson argues that the field, which encompasses "the combined cultural, medial, affective, and narrative study of law as legality[,] offers a set of methods and theories with which to address the most pressing issues of the present" and to "more fully grasp[] crisis points in the past" (189, 17).The monograph draws on Olson's comparative expertise as an English and American Studies scholar currently teaching in Germany.Law and literature scholars based at law schools often appear to be the monograph's target audience, but Olson's interventions will also enlighten scholars whose work more generally analyzes how literature, politics, and social change intersect.