Studies in the Novel

From the early medieval English ballads of Robin Hood and Shakespeare’s history plays, to postcolonial discussions of primary texts such as Ned Kelly’s “The Jerilderie Letter,” poetry that reflects upon the Northern Ireland Troubles, the twentieth-century espionage novels of John le Carré and Don DeLillo, and the speculative fiction of William Gibson, the breadth of material that Conor McCarthy analyzes in Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature shows how the themes of outlawry and espionage are not only linked, but are essential characteristics of literature. His transatlantic study transcends geographical barriers and historical time periods to show the ever-present and long-lasting effects of legal exclusion within literary texts. Impressively studying a variety of forms and genres, McCarthy reminds readers that the role of outlawry is one that historians and literary scholars should be familiar with; yet, he differs from those cultural historians who focus on the outlaw as an archetype who challenges authority. Instead, McCarthy explores the implications of state power to show how the evolution of legal exclusion within literature prompts further potential discussion about literature’s role in representing and questioning the state’s actions of legal exclusion. Successfully showing that legal exclusion is still “alive in the 20^th and 21^st century west” (133), McCarthy argues that contemporary reinterpretations of outlawry and espionage produce narratives that demand and imagine potential avenues for justice.

Students of state power will greatly benefit from McCarthy’s introduction, which provides a theoretical landscape of state power as explored by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Aligning himself with these thinkers—particularly Agamben’s use of the Homo sacer—McCarthy argues that literary and legal texts since the Middle Ages have been concerned with characters who are excluded from law. Rather than the dominant critical approach of reading outlawry as a representation of state weakness, McCarthy’s first chapter, “Outside the Law in the Middle Ages,” shows how exclusion becomes a tactic for state control. Pointing to wolf imagery—a useful theme McCarthy returns to throughout the book—he sets the stage for a fascinating discussion of how marginal groups face injustices by the state’s use of legal exclusion, as “equating the outlaw with the wolf…is to render the man into beast, to place the outlaw, like an animal beneath the law” (23). The metaphor that equates man to animal is well established throughout postcolonial literary traditions that represent marginal populations as dehumanized. A more thorough discussion of how outlawry impacts these particular groups would have been both timely and appropriate, as the book’s analysis of the outlaw as ‘social bandit’—such as Robin Hood, who takes from the rich to give to the poor, and Hereward, the Englishman who engages in guerilla warfare—might suggest that social justice to protect marginal groups, in terms of gender, race, and nationhood, is a key component to these early outlaw narratives.

The second and third chapters further discuss legal exclusion as an enduring tactic of state power, showing the reader how the outlaw narrative continues beyond the Middle Ages, and further, how literature offers a critique of the outlaw’s legal exclusion from the state. Drawing from an exploration of the unstable national identity of the state in Henry V, and a discussion that engages numerous accounts of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly to reveal how Kelly’s postcolonial discourse is similar to Irish nationalism, McCarthy solidifies his claim in the first half of Outlaws and Spies: that legal exclusion [End Page 356] is maintained throughout time, and that studying such exclusion in literature reveals discourses of social justice. For example, using Kelly, McCarthy shows that while the state’s rhetoric attempted to reduce the outlaw to that of a wild animal, similar to the wolf imagery discussed early on, Kelly’s speech points out that there is something wrong with a state and its relationship to its citizens when...