The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

Crystal Parikh is Professor at New York University in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English, and Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. She is the author of Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (2017) and An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent US Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies. She co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge, 2015).