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Fiorato, Sidia --- "Women and contracts in Angela Carter’s postmodern revision of the fairy tale" [2017] ELECD 616; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Comparative Contract Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 361

Book Title: Comparative Contract Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804516

Section: Chapter 15

Section Title: Women and contracts in Angela Carter’s postmodern revision of the fairy tale

Author(s): Fiorato, Sidia

Number of pages: 22

Abstract/Description:

‘[L]aw and narrative are inseparably related’: stories define a society’s commitment to the law, they describe, and at the same time ground, the normative world in which a community lives. This reciprocal relationship is clearly exemplified by folk and fairy tales, a genre which has successfully morphed itself to illuminate contingent historical moments by attesting to the cultural mentalities dominant in different periods and by contributing to the codification of social norms. Man, ‘the story telling animal’engages in the attempt to understand and portray the world through his stories, a common hermeneutic aim shared by both law and literature. As Costantini asserts, the law needs the medium of a corpus for its actualization, which is both a physical corpus of a person who ‘embodies’ the law and a material corpus represented by the book of law; however, the law also needs a corpus over which it can exert its authority and control and through which it can perpetuate itself. The people of a community ‘embody’ such corpus in their behavior toward each other and their relationships (personal and/or professional) in everyday life; moreover, the stories of their tradition stage the cultural imagination as a juridical space of action for the law. ‘A legal tradition … includes not only a corpus iuris, but also a language and a mythos – narratives in which the corpus iuris is located by those whose wills act upon it’, and also narratives by the addressee of the action of the law.