Infrastructure and public works

This entry surveys the disciplinary convergence of law, literature, and infrastructure. It acknowledges the small amount of scholarship that currently exists in this emerging subfield, before identifying areas of shared interest between legal scholars and literary critics. These common concerns include, most fundamentally, the material affordances of formal language. After addressing recent research that considers issues of diction, genre, and reception, the entry concludes by summarizing recent efforts by literary critics to develop interpretive programs that can grasp the silent and hidden work of infrastructure, and specifies what those projects can learn from legal scholarship.