Drawing on primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterisation mingled with character-centred legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession.

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Character-Building: Narrative Theory, Narrative Jurisprudence, and the Idea of Character
• 1 Incriminating Character: Revisiting the Right to Silence in Adam Bede and The Scarlet Letter
• 2 Gossip, Hearsay, and the Character Exception: Reputation on Trial in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and R v Rowton
• 3 Defamation of Character: Anthony Trollope and the Law of Libel
• 4 Dignity, Disclosure, and the Right to Privacy: The Strange Characters of Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray
• 5 The English Dreyfus Case: Status as Character in an Illiberal Age
• Works Cited
• Index