Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Form and Reform
Seiten
2025
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-60855-8 (ISBN)
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-60855-8 (ISBN)
Lucy Powell recovers lost layers of meaning within the prison scenes which abound in the eighteenth-century novel. Powell reveals prisons' fourfold particularity as cultural and narrative spaces, stressing, with bold originality, the political and social, as opposed to the domestic and interior, aspects of the novel as a form.
Drawing on an array of literary, penological, archival, and visual sources, this study explores the abundance of prison scenes in the eighteenth-century British novel. Revealing the four distinct prison cultures of the period, it illuminates how the narrative and ideological meanings of these institutions have been distorted by our long-held fascination with the criminal penitentiaries of the nineteenth century. Ranging from the early Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate to the prison sackings of the Gordon Riots of 1780, what emerges are not narratives of interiority and autonomous individuation, but something like the opposite of this: tales that stress the interdependence and sociality of eighteenth-century selfhood. Contextualising the carceral scenes of writers like Defoe, Haywood, Sterne, Smollett, and the Fieldings, Prison and the Novel invites us to rethink familiar accounts of the novel as a form, and of what it means to spend time inside.
Drawing on an array of literary, penological, archival, and visual sources, this study explores the abundance of prison scenes in the eighteenth-century British novel. Revealing the four distinct prison cultures of the period, it illuminates how the narrative and ideological meanings of these institutions have been distorted by our long-held fascination with the criminal penitentiaries of the nineteenth century. Ranging from the early Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate to the prison sackings of the Gordon Riots of 1780, what emerges are not narratives of interiority and autonomous individuation, but something like the opposite of this: tales that stress the interdependence and sociality of eighteenth-century selfhood. Contextualising the carceral scenes of writers like Defoe, Haywood, Sterne, Smollett, and the Fieldings, Prison and the Novel invites us to rethink familiar accounts of the novel as a form, and of what it means to spend time inside.
Lucy Powell is a Leverhulme ECR (Early Career Research) fellow at the University of Oxford. She was a New Generation Thinker for the BBC and AHRC and has presented programmes across the network on everything from silence to dreams. Her writing has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Life, Life Writing, The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian, among others.
Introduction; 1. Criminal prisons: questions of character; 2. Debtors' prisons: questions of justice; 3. The bridewell: questions of class; 4. State prisons: questions of national identity; Conclusion: the Gordon Riots; Bibliography: primary sources; Bibliography: secondary sources; Bibliography: online resources; Index.
| Erscheinungsdatum | 21.10.2025 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | Worked examples or Exercises |
| Verlagsort | Cambridge |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Gewicht | 488 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-009-60855-X / 100960855X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-009-60855-8 / 9781009608558 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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Buch | Softcover (2025)
De Gruyter (Verlag)
CHF 62,90
