Banished Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England - Goodman, Nan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
Biographical note: Nan Goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also teaches law. She is author of Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor (with Michael P. Kramer) of The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch
Main description: Banished investigates Puritan practices of social exclusion through the lens of seventeenth-century New England common law. From religious dissident Anne Hutchinson to the Deer Island Indians, cases of banishment reveal the impact of legal rhetoric on our conceptualization, past and present, of community boundaries and belonging