Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights

A bold and accessible argument for the moral and political value of literature in rightless times.

The obvious humanity of books would seem to make literature and human rights natural allies. But what is the real connection between literature and human rights? In this short polemical book, Lyndsey Stonebridge shows how the history of human rights owes much to the creative imagining of writers. Yet, she argues, it is not enough to claim that literature is the empathetic wing of the human rights movement. At a time when human rights are so blatantly under attack, the writers we need how are the political truthtellers, the bold callers out of easy sympathy and comfortable platitudes.

Author: Lyndsey Stonebridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/01/2023
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9780192884688
ISBN10: 0192884689
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Subjects & Themes | Politics
- Political Science | Human Rights
- Social Science | Sociology | General

About the Author

Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights, University of Birmingham

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at University of Birmingham. Her books include: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011/2014), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety (2007), and British Fiction after Modernism (with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently collaborating on a large interdisciplinary project, Refugee Hosts.