Fictions of justice : literary lawyers in the American South, 1946-1966

This thesis re-examines and redefines the structuring paradoxes of the post-war American South through a sustained interrogation of its literary lawyers. Alert to overlapping spaces of race, law, history, and violence, I argue that the fictional lawyer sheds new light on the critically neglected pre- civil rights era by connecting the Cold War American novel to the contradictory discourses of the American South's shifting social and legal terrain. In an era caught between localised reassertions of racial hierarchy and the broader national claims of emancipatory justice and equality, I contend that my four central writers - William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Jesse Hill Ford, and Ann Fairbairn - employ their legal characters to embody the unsettled meanings of law and justice in a region poised on, but still awaiting, the transformative changes wrought by later civil rights legislation. Reacting to a growing body of scholarship that bears scepticism toward dominant claims of the neutrality, objectivity, and color blindness of American law, and refracting these theories through a careful explication of the specific dilemmas fictional Southern lawyers faced during the turbulent post-war era, I maintain that such characters operate in distinctive ways. Rather than simply reasserting that Southern texts degenerate into populist narratives reinscribing the lenticular logics that have, for decades, neatly partitioned race and racism from American law, I demonstrate instead that these legal characters - appearing in texts published between 1946 and 1966 - uniquely focus and embody the emerging narratives of race and law that characterised the regional and national politics of the civil rights struggle.