Imagining World Order

Chenxi Tang
German
UC Berkeley

This book project is an intellectual history as well as a literary history of international order. It reconstructs the main theoretical paradigms of international law, and examines the major literary forms in the European tradition in relation to international law, arguing that the literary imagination played a decisive role in shaping international legal thought and figuring international order. In developing this argument, the project places the history of European literature from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century in an entirely new perspective, reinterpreting the Renaissance epic, baroque political romance, baroque tragedy, the eighteenth-century novel, German romanticism and classicism, and nineteenth-century historiography and grand opera. The book is thus at once a literary history of international law and an international legal history of European literature, creating for the first time a dialogue between literary studies, legal history, and international jurisprudence.