Law and love

"Taking Lear as his text, Kahn argues that in the West, we share an ambiguous cultural heritage in which law is both the answer to and the problem of the human condition. We think of law's rule as both a triumph over the state of nature and as a tragedy rooted in our inability to overcome self-interest.". "Kahn reads King Lear as a meditation on political psychology, on the demands that politics makes upon the human soul. The play juxtaposes the necessities of love with those of the state and shows us how deeply incommensurate the two are. These are Christian themes, although the play strips them of the redemptive message of Christianity, leaving irreconcilable tragedy.". "Law and Love shows what the best interdisciplinary work can achieve. In addition to providing surprising new readings of all of the major characters in the play, this book expands the horizons of literary studies by introducing the concerns of the legal imagination, and it introduces law into the heart of cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction, Spiritual. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.