Reading for Law in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger

Abstract

The contestation between a humanist, ethical law and a dehumanizing, profit-exalting law animates the plot and is dramatically embodied in the principal characters of Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.1 In the process, the novel illuminates the three intertwined concerns central to James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination: how language constitutes cultures, communities, and selves; how politics and ethics are encoded in different ways of talking about other people (as objects or “means to an end” rather than “centers of autonomy and value”); and how forms of inherited speech and expression both constrain and enliven the imagination.2 The fact that Sacred Hunger is a historical novel about Britain’s role in the slave trade—a literature of realities—adds layers of complexity to its legal imaginations.