Includes bibliographical references (p. [269]-291) and index.

Foreword: Rights on paper / Joseph R. Slaughter -- Introduction: Human rights and literature: the development of an interdiscipline / Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore -- "Literature," the "rights of man," and narratives of atrocity: historical backgrounds to the culture of testimony / Julie Stone Peters -- Enabling fictions and novel subjects: the bildungsroman and international human rights law / Joseph R. Slaughter -- Top down, bottom up, horizontally: resignifying the universal in human rights discourse / Domna C. Stanton -- The social imaginary as a problematic for human rights / Meili Steele -- Intimations of what was to come: Edwidge Danticat's The farming of bones and the indivisibility of human rights / Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg -- Paradoxes of neoliberalism and human rights / Greg Mullins -- Reading the living archives: the witness of literary art / Carolyn Forché -- Narrating human rights and the limits of magic realism in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the clown / Elizabeth S. Anker -- Complicities of witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine / Wendy Kozol -- Dark chamber, colonial scene: post-9/11 torture and representation / Stephanie Athey -- Human rights as violence and enigma: can literature really be of any help with the politics of human rights? / Nick Mansfield -- Imagining women as human / Hephzibah Roskelly -- "Disaster capitalism" and human rights: embodiment and subalternity in Indra Sinha's Animal's people / Alexandra Schultheis Moore -- Do human rights need a self? Buddhist literature and the samsaric subject / Gregory Price Grieve -- Epilogue / Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore.