Chenxi Tang

Chenxi Tang

Chenxi Tang

Type
Associate Professor Fellow
Department
German
2013-14

Chenxi Tang’s project in German, "Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature in Europe, 1500-1900," is an intellectual and 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. Tang places the history of European literature in a new perspective, reinterpreting the Renaissance epic, baroque political romance, French classical tragedy, German baroque Trauerspiel, the eighteenth-century novel, German romanticism and classicism, nineteenth-century historiography, and grand opera. Literature, Tang argues, provided an imaginative space for tackling the uncertainty and instability of international order and, in so doing, prompted international law to adjust itself and to evolve. As a literary history of international law and international legal history of European literature, the book brings into conversation literary studies, legal history, and international jurisprudence.