...Jamie Luis Parra Jamie Luis Parra, “The Desire for Lawlessness: Law, Freedom, and the Aesthetic in The Bondwoman’s Narrative ” (pp. 1–41) This essay begins by discussing Hannah Crafts’s engagement with the debates of the 1850s over the relationship between civic law and moral philosophy. In her...

...John Owen Havard John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein , Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what...

...Hiroki Yoshikuni Hiroki Yoshikuni, “Kant with Bartleby: A Fate of Freedom” (pp. 37–63) This essay explores the problem of the “unaccountable” in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1856) in light of the Kantian idea of freedom. The lawyer-narrator declares his own inability to tell a story...