From Milton to McEwan, there is an intimate relationship between human rights and literature, especially since the advent of the Enlightenment project. Literature’s historically unique ability to inhabit the perspective of those whose rights have been violated predisposes literature for modern rights advocacy.

The scale of literature’s impact on rights is convincingly and wide-ragingly analysed by Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007):

reading accounts of torture of epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back out as new concepts about the organization of social and political life. New kinds of reading (viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (empathy) which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights).

(Hunt, 2007: 34).

Prior to Hunt’s analysis, it was evident that literature had provoked the ratification of rights through educating their literate (and generally influential) readership of the hardships faced by the most vulnerable (and generally least influential) members of society. Charles Dickens is certainly the most famous and effective novelist in this regard. Most notably, Bleak House (1853) was a key component of the formation of the Supreme Court of Judicature- the British judiciary’s contemporaneous structure (Oldham, 2004).

However, Hunt expands upon this analysis, claiming that literature does not just educate individuals but fundamentally changes their outlook. She contends that reading first-person narratives that document atrocities develop one’s empathy for others; and argues that this heightened level of empathy drives the formation and ratification of human rights.

Hunt’s analysis concludes that literature has fundamentally supported , a position challenged by Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights Inc. (2007) which conducts a thorough analysis of Bildungsromane (‘coming of age’ novels). He argues that the Bildungsroman demonstrates that one is not “born free and equal in dignity and rights”. Slaughter then argues that one becomes a citizen and eligible for human rights upon the attainment of Bildung (which can be loosely translated as maturity). Slaughter utilises a range of Bildungsromane to convincingly argue that they suggest that human rights are a reciprocal arrangement- one must respect others’ rights (be civil) in order to have one’s own rights respected (be treated with civility).

This is a controversial conclusion that cuts against the liberal conception of human rights as an inalienable ethical framework. Although controversial, this conception of human rights is not unprecedented: in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt makes the same argument utilising political theory. In Arendt’s mind, one becomes human upon participation in a community; and we know that human rights are a reciprocal arrangement because if only a “single human being existed on earth” these rights would no longer be “valid and real”. Arendt concludes that human rights are a product of human organization and are impossible without the presence of politics which is premised on plurality. Thus, she argues, “we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (Arendt, 2019: 300).

As this brief comparative study of Hunt and Slaughter starts to demonstrate, human rights and literature have a relationship of significant importance. Contemporarily, there is a fascinating discourse on children’s rights in British literature- not least in the works of Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith. Unfortunately, this narrative is frequently overlooked by reviewers and under analysed by literary critics. Many critics seem too preoccupied with committing the intentional fallacy to properly engage with the rights discourse in these works. Peter Childs’s ‘The Construction of Childhood’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan (2019) gave a fascinating insight into The Children Act (2014), The Child in Time (1987), The Cement Garden (1978), Atonement (2001), and Nutshell’s (2016) children’s rights discourse and provided a fantastic springboard for further research into McEwan’s exploration of rights. It is not just an academic but also an ethical prerogative that critics take up this opportunity to explore the insights that Ian McEwan, one of the greatest political novelists of our time, has into human rights.

Sir Terry Eagleton concluded that all literary theory is necessarily political. On that basis, human rights should be of paramount concern to literary critics. He went on to argue in The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) that literary critics were losing sight of ethics and objectivity due to the influence of cultural theory. That hypothesis has proven increasingly true. As a result, we have lost valuable literary insights. The huge gaps in the literary analysis of contemporary novels overlooks compelling human rights discourse in favour of analysis that is of negligible practical use. Which to paraphrase Romeo and Juliet, begs the question literary criticism, ‘wherefore art thou value?’

Bibliography:

Arendt, H. (2019). The Human Condition. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Eagleton, T. (1992). The Illusions of Postmodernism. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hunt, L. (2007). Inventing Human Rights: A History. London: W. W. Norton & Company.

McEwan, I. (1978). The Cement Garden. London: Vintage.

McEwan, I. (1987). The Child in Time. London: Vintage.

McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London: Vintage.

McEwan, I. (2015). The Children Act. London: Vintage.

McEwan, I. (2016). Nutshell. London: Vintage.

Childs, P. (2019). ‘The Construction of Childhood’, in Dominic Head (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Milton, J. (2008). Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Slaughter, J. (2007). Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. London: Fordham University Press.