Bioethics and Biolaw Through Literature

Description

In today s world, the increasing progress in biotechnologies has paved the way for profound challenges to basic notions definingthe human existence. Paramount concepts, such as autonomy, dignity and the very assumption of human finitude, need to be reframed in the light of unprecedented innovations and possibilities. The multidisciplinary encounter of literature, bioethics and biolaw offers the opportunity to investigate the impacts on human life stemming from scientific potentialities and pretensions. The aim of this book is to merge the two fields of bioethics and law (or biolaw) through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived." Introduction FROM A LEGAL PERSPECTIVE The Genetics of Law and Literature: What is Man? Ghostly Presences: The Case of Bertha Mason The Case of Conjoined Twins: Medical Dilemma in Law and Literature Vida Interminable: Patients and Family Members Between the Right to Live and the Obligation Not to Die Reading Beyond the Ratio: Searching for the Subtext in the “Enforced Caesarean” Cases FROM A LITERARY PERSPECTIVE Science Fiction and Bioethical Knowledge Shaping Personhood: Problems of Subjectivity and the Self in Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing On the Sciences of Man in Eighteenth Century English Literature and Art: Anatomizing the Self The Beyond: Science and Law in The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells Bio-Ethics Avant la Lettre: Ninenteenth-Century Instances in Post-Darwinian Literature Rhetoric, Lexicography and Bioethics in Shelley Jackson’s Hypertext Patchwork Girl One Monstrous Ogre and One Patchwork Girl: Two Nameless Beings A Serious Reading of Biotechnology in Japanese Graphic Novels: Weak Thoughts Regarding Ethics, Literature and Medicine Fulfilling Personhood at the Margins of Life: Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing “So what is a human being?” An Exploration of Personhood Through Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods The Problem of Liminal Beings in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things “Murderous Creators”: How Far Can Authors Go? Fay Weldon’s The Lives and Loves of a She Devil: Cosmetic Surgery as a Social Mask of Personhood APPENDIX Mapping the Law: Reading Old Maps of Strasbourg as Representing and Constituting Legal Spaces and Places