Abstract
The capacity for maps to create knowledge about the phenomena they purport only to represent is well known. To refer to a literary example, in Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya (1897), knowledge comes from observing maps of the same changing landscape through time and reflecting on the significance of the connections that they record. Such observations provide the doctor, Astrov, with the scope of mind to seek change. (The university academic, Professor Serebryakov, by contrast, is no source of knowledge at all as he cares only for peer approval: his ideas are stagnant, unchanged for twenty-five years.) As now is a moment of mapping of the law and humanities field, these observations feel pertinent, at least in a UK context. In summer 2025, the recently formed Law and Humanities Hub (“LHub”), at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, published the LHub Law and the Humanities Map. Under the direction of Anat Rosenberg, LHub seeks to record, with this map, in a manner that is “inclusive, representative, and responsive” (LHub blog, July 3, 2025), the presence of law and humanities scholarly communities in academia across the UK. In doing so, the map also has the potential to instigate new connections by exposing associations that do not yet exist.
Coincidentally, Law, Narrative and Masterplot, edited by Chris Bevan and David Gurnham, was published at this moment of mapping in summer 2025. Like the LHub map, the collection has the potential to inspire new interdisciplinary connections. The volume explores the “literary device” of the “masterplot,” which it describes as “narratives that derive from very deeply and firmly embedded beliefs, conventions, and assumptions” and that provide “the foundations upon which other considerations are built” (6-7). Focusing on the implications of this literary device for legal studies, fifteen scholars, predominantly lawyers, critically engage with a wide array of legal subject matter, from domestic violence to public international law, cohabitation rules to criminal law, homelessness to energy law, international criminal law to protest trials. The result is a compelling read.
For this reviewer, the collection’s most intriguing feature is that its individual chapters are simultaneously highly unified—by the central idea of the “masterplot” and its genealogy—and hugely fragmented—by the diversity of conclusions about how masterplots operate, if they do at all, in different legal areas. This diversity is well illustrated by the editors’ separate substantive chapters, which appear together under the theme “Responsibility and Blame.” Bevan boldly traverses 800 years of history in fifteen pages, referencing secondary literature only and claiming to show “centuries of continuity, repetition, and reiteration” of the “homelessness masterplot” (71). This masterplot, based on a “binary” distinction drawn between the deserving and the undeserving, has “intoxicating narrative coherence” (72). By contrast, Gurnham opens his chapter with a discussion of the “perennial difficulty” of “the idea of a single organising framework or ‘masterplot’” in legal studies, as a single idea is hard to reconcile with “the multiplicity of competing perspectives” (74). Gurnham nevertheless reflects on what it would mean to contemplate the “punitive narrative” of the criminal law as a “kind of ‘masterplot’ for punishment discourse” (77). Elegantly unfolding the “curious . . . convergence” of a “punitive narrative” in law and in personal expressive works (poems) written by prisoners, he concludes that the punitive narrative is simply “not quite so narrow or obscure, as it is often assumed to be” (96). Whether the punitive narrative can be considered a “masterplot” or should be given “some similar label that connotes a significance greater than one narrative among many,” is worthy of further consideration (96).
Elsewhere in the volume, other positions are taken vis-à-vis the masterplot and its significance for law. The legal historian Rebecca Probert points out that to construe the legal definition of marriage as a “masterplot” is to obscure its contingencies. For instance, marriage, defined as “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others” (Lord Penzance Hyde v. Hyde, 1866), was never a legal reality (141). And even if taken as a “residual trace” of an earlier, more cohesive Anglican marriage masterplot, that concept was always contested (145). Other chapters assert the utility of a masterplot as an explanation for legal thinking. For example, Rebecca Shaw explores how statutory reform debates culminating in the UK Domestic Abuse Act 2021 were shaped by “storytelling,” for example, “choice of voice and narration” (116), underpinned by a “domestic legal violence and abuse ‘masterplot’” rooted in gender inequality (101). For Shaw, literary theory not only helps expose this “masterplot” as a serious problem for law-making but can also provide a “solution” (117): we should effect a “narrative shift” in policy debates, by meaningfully including survivor voices (116).
No account of this volume would be complete without mention of the innovative use of literary thinking by Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko in a chapter about public international law. Krivenko argues that Franz Kafka’s narrative style, in subverting traditional modes of storytelling through its multidirectional and unfinished qualities, exposes how masterplots only assume the authority we give them. Kafka’s writing displaces the usual understanding of the masterplot (a single, unified voice) with a decentralized plot characterized by diffused, disjointed, and complex polyphony. In illustrating how the masterplot’s centralizing power can be subverted, Krivenko argues that Kafka can inspire public international lawyers to embrace polyphony and “different nuances of meaning” (227).
The range of scholarly positions about the masterplot’s application in legal analysis is one reason why Law, Narrative and Masterplot is so thought-provoking, but it also raises many questions. First, how best can we “include the narratives of the excluded, of the marginalised” in the legal sphere (102)? Here, Gurnham’s finding that the personal expressive poems written by prisoners may be imbued with legal punitive language complicates our task and invites us to ask: what is the impact of systematic disempowerment on the self-expression of those who are marginalized? If we return to the idea of the map, future scholarship should look beyond law and literature, perhaps to psychology, to empirically uncover the impact of the repeated effacement of voice (here by “masterplots”) on marginalized people’s self-perception, self-worth, and self-expression, or to carceral geography, to gain insights into the lived experience of incarcertation through geographical methods relating people and spaces. To meaningfully empower those who are excluded such that their voices can truly be heard in the legal sphere is unlikely to be a matter for law and literature alone.
Second, while this is a rich and stimulating volume, is the plurality of humanities approaches obscured by its tight focus on a single literary concept? If the power of the humanities is to provide lawyers with the insights of “other minds in other worlds,” as James Boyd White suggests in “What Can a Lawyer Learn from Literature,” Harvard LR (1989), we should also recognize that past times are “other worlds.” An historical approach to law, narrative, and masterplots requires an initial disconnection from the present and immersion in the archive. With the exception of the chapter by Probert, in this volume, the present is read into the past through fleeting and undeveloped throw-backs to past times which foreclose meaningful historical engagement. As I have shown in my own work, original historical work with primary sources can expose narratives that have been long forgotten, destabilizing the presumed continuity of the past with the present (Cooper’s Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (2018)). A nuanced and complex understanding of the past, rooted in rigorous archival work, can also provide opportunities to resist, question, and reimagine the perceived deeply rooted “truths” of the present.
Finally, we might ask about the path not taken by this volume: the interdisciplinary excavation of the genealogy of the “masterplot” beyond its formulation by H. Porter Abbott in “Defining Narrative,” his contribution to The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edition (2008), which all the chapters in Law, Narrative and Masterplot unquestioningly cite. Just as the modern notion of the “author” has been shown to be far from timeless and universal (e.g., Jaszi and Woodmansee’s, The Construction of Authorship (1994)), original “plots” were not always attributed to authors. This observation invites reflection on the dynamics of the masterplot’s own conceptual history, including the role of law in conceptual changes. Original plots became proprietary only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did the proprietization of original plots impact the plots that were free to become “masterplots” by virtue of being unoriginal, owned by no one, and open to repetition through their “communal” (21), “common sense” (7), and “taken-for-granted” quality (20)?
Whether we think these questions should be addressed in different interdisciplinary scholarship or we understand their answers to be inextricably connected to the scholarly project of the present volume will depend on how we see the present boundaries of our law and humanities map and our scope of mind in changing them. What is clear is that, in raising these questions and the lines of inquiry they open, Law, Narrative and Masterplot should become an essential reference point for all scholars of law and humanities, leading the way for much future innovative interdisciplinary scholarship.