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BIDDEFORD, Maine

Cathrine Frank publishes article in the journal 'Law and Humanities'

Cathrine Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of English, published the essay β€œGossip, Hearsay and the Character Exception in Victorian Law and Literature” in the international journal Law and Humanities.  

Frank’s essay contrasts the uses of gossip in fiction to legal rules against the admission of hearsay evidence, particularly as they impinge on nineteenth-century ideas about character. 

Looking at Anne BrontΓ«'s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) and the controversial decision in R v Rowton (1865), especially its discussion of the meaning of character and the best, admissible means of accessing it, Frank argues that the novel's more capacious rules of evidence repurpose hearsay and find other uses for it: a sociological one of creating and maintaining communal boundaries; an epistemological one of confirming, discovering or otherwise creating knowledge, and a narratological one of generating plot.

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