• Accident

    Author(s):
    Daniel Williams (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone, TC Law and the Humanities
    Subject(s):
    Law and literature, British literature, Nineteenth century, Twentieth century
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Accident, Non-Human, Thomas Hardy, e.m. forster, thomas de quincey, 19th-century British literature, 20th-century British literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/em4w-am11
    Abstract:
    ​This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liability and workplace compensation. The chapter turns on the institution of the deodand, a common-law rule that allowed inquest juries to assess liability for accidental deaths caused by non-humans. After such entities began to include industrial machines, the deodand was abolished by Parliament in 1846. Examining legal-historical cases and norms alongside literary-cultural representations, the chapter claims that the deodand’s disappearance, and concurrent transition to fault liability regimes, marked a loss in the understanding of accident. If the nineteenth-century emergence of modern accident law tended to simplify accidents into surrogates for human interaction, the deodand qua institution grasped how reckoning with accidents demands an alertness to human entanglement with non-human causality. Literary representations of vehicular accidents afford a glimpse of what was coming to be lost in this changing legal-cultural dispensation. From Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Hardy to E. M. Forster, the complex non-human, material, and affective dimensions of accident dissipate into the background, where they continue to supply narrative and formal motivation even as they leave human obligations and institutions in the light.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.45
    Publisher:
    Oxford University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2019
    Book Title:
    The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities
    Author/Editor:
    Simon Stern, Maksymilian Del Mar, and Bernadette Meyler
    Chapter:
    45
    Page Range:
    335 - 351
    ISBN:
    9780190695620
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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