A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada - Softcover

Authers, Benjamin James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442625791 ISBN 13: 9781442625792

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2016

Synopsis

With the passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, rights took on new legal, political, and social significance in Canada. In the decades following, Canadian jurisprudence has emphasised the importance of rights, determining their shape and asserting their centrality to legal ideas about what Canada represents. At the same time, an increasing number of Canadian  novels have also engaged with the language of human rights and civil liberties, reflecting, like their counterparts in law, the possibilities of rights and the failure of their protection.

In A Culture of Rights, Benjamin Authers reads novels by authors including Joy Kogawa, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Jeanette Armstrong alongside legal texts and key constitutional rights cases, arguing for the need for a more complex, interdisciplinary understanding of the sources of rights in Canada and elsewhere. He suggests that, at present, even when rights are violated, popular insistence on Canada’s rights-driven society remains. Despite the limited scope of our rights, and the deferral of more substantive rights protections to some projected, ideal Canada, we remain keen to promote ourselves as members of an entirely just society.

About this title

About the Author:

Benjamin Authers is a Lecturer in Law in the College of Business Government and Law, Flinders University, South Australia,
Chief Editor, Flinders Law Journal, and President of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand..

Review:

‘This book is a good model of interdisciplinarity – Authers succeeds in marrying the different domains of law and literature in a complex and interesting analysis.’

(G.A. McBeath Choice, vol 54:04:2016)

"For readers interested in delving into how the values of the Charter are represented and understood in Canadian culture, A Culture of Rights provides an excellent introduction."

(Jianna Rieder Saskatchewan Law Review)

"A Culture of Rights is an insightful contribution to Canadian cultural criticism and opens more space for readings of the relationship between literature and politics."

(Jeremy Haynes, McMaster University University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1442625791
• ISBN 13: 9781442625792
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208