Victory of Law

A sophisticated and learned defense of the ardor of law, as well as a probing study of both literary assumptions and literary practice. There is no question that Nabers' passionate and rigorous analysis of the ambiguities, both legal and literary, of Melville's Battle-Pieces is unprecedented. There is simply nothing like it in Melville scholarship. In recasting the boundaries between politics and poetics, and even the secular and the sacred, Nabers sets out to make good his identification of the Fourteenth Amendment as the 'American Civil War Poem.' Large and magisterial terms such as 'slavery' and 'race' gain depth through Nabers' thorough examination of legal terminology, his profound understanding of the dangerous intoxication of generalities, and his consequent demand for definition. A formidable and demanding book, Victory of Law rethinks the very nature of constitutional law, as it breathes new life into our understanding of the 'American Renaissance.'

Nabers’ bold and pellucid book on the imagination of the Fourteenth Amendment is necessary reading for several skewed constituencies. Literary critics will be grateful for its trenchant and startling readings of American authors—Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, preeminently Melville—whose work was importantly dedicated, content and form, to the legal problematics of emancipation. Legal scholars will be assured by Nabers’ erudition and charmed by his measured tribute to the legal imagination. (Like critics of the law, Nabers knows that the law is self-contradictory and ideological. But he treats self-contradictions as opportunities for the crucial mating of strange bedfellows—positive law and natural law, natural law and the Constitution—and is as apt to discover emancipative as repressive potential in American ideology.) Americanists will find cause for celebration in the precise elegance of Nabers’ choreography of ideology, law, history, and text. And, at every point of the conceptual history, the imaginative triumph of the Fourteenth Amendment comes into sharper and sharper focus.