Wounded Feelings is the first legal history of emotions in Canada. Through detailed histories of how people litigated emotional injuries like dishonour, humiliation, grief, and betrayal before the Quebec civil courts from 1870 to 1950, Eric H. Reiter explores the confrontation between people's lived experience of emotion and the legal categories and terminology of lawyers, judges, and courts. Drawing on archival case files, newspapers, and contemporary legal writings, he examines how individuals narrated their claims of injured feelings and how the courts assessed those claims using legal rules, social norms, and the judges' own feelings to validate certain emotional injuries and reject others.
The cases reveal both contemporary views of emotion as well as the family, gender, class, linguistic, and racial dynamics that shaped those understandings and their adjudication. Examples include a family's grief over their infant son's death due to a physician's prescription error, a wealthy woman's mortification at being harassed by a conductor aboard a train, and a Black man's indignation at being denied seats at a Montreal cinema. The book also traces an important legal change in how moral injury was conceptualized in Quebec civil law over the period as it came to be linked to the developing idea of personality rights. By 1950 the subjective richness of stories of wounded feelings was increasingly put into the language of violated rights, a development with implications for both social understandings of emotion and how individuals presented their emotional injuries in court.
By:
Eric H. Reiter
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 150mm,
Spine: 33mm
Weight: 740g
ISBN: 9781487526986
ISBN 10: 1487526989
Series: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History
Pages: 504
Publication Date: 04 September 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Feelings and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Quebec 2. Shame, Mortification, Disgrace, Dishonour 3. Family Dishonour 4. Bodily Intrusion 5. Betrayal 6. Grief and Mourning 7. Indignation, Anger, Fear 8. Conclusion: From Wounded Feelings to Violated Rights Abbreviations Case Citations Notes Bibliography Index
Eric H. Reiter is an associate professor in the Department of History at Concordia University and a member of the Quebec Bar.
Reviews for Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1950
Wounded Feelings is a very rich book that less seeks to provide a simple explanation of what emotional suffering was meant to be than to use discussions of such feeling as an access point to how people considered questions of self, reputation, bodily autonomy, and personal rights. -- Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide * <em>Borealia</em> *
- Winner of CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize 2020 (Canada)
- Winner of Governor General's History Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research 2020 (Canada)
- Winner of Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research 2020 (Canada)
- Winner of La Fondation du Barreau du Québec prix des meilleures monographies 2021 (Canada)
