Literature and Crime in Augustan EnglandRoutledge, 2020 M01 8 - 260 pages Eighteenth-century England saw an explosion of writings about deviance. In literature, in the law, and in the press, writers returned again and again to the question of crime and criminals. While the extension of the legal system formalised the power of the state to categorise and punish ‘deviance’, writers repeatedly confronted the problematic nature of legal authority and the unstable idea of ‘the criminal’. Some of this commentary was supportive, some was subversive and resistant, uncovering the complexity of issues the law sought to ignore. Originally published in 1991, Ian Bell’s masterly investigation of the diverse representations of crime and legality in the Augustan period ranges widely across the contemporary press, involving court reports, philosophical writings, periodicals, biographies, pornography and polemics. Re-assessing the canonical texts of eighteenth-century ‘Literature’, Bell situates the work of Defoe, Hogarth, Gay, Swift, Pope, Richardson and Fielding in its social and political context. |
From inside the book
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... wages, which may be some satisfaction to the ass she carries. From the Memoirs of the Right Villainous John Hall, 1708 Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Buttock and Twang 1 Literature/crime/society Talking about.
... John Hall in 1708, finding in that evocative phrase an image for the recognised protocols and procedures of this kind of critical study. Following the established patterns of earlier commentators on historical crime, my plan was to ...
... John Mallory's The Attorney's Pocket Companion, Michael Dalton's The Country Justice, Theodore Barlow's The Justice of the Peace, or any of the other digests available in the mid-century. By this method, a magistrate could make ...
... John Hall would call 'running-smoblers'. There may be something in what Sharpe says, for there are certainly some pretty feeble books on Shakespeare's England and the Elizabethan underworld and Dickens's London and so on, written as ...
... John Loftis on dramatic characters.40 In a more recent work, Lawrence Stone too deals with 'the stereotypes of fiction, the theatre, and popular imagination'.41 I have argued elsewhere that this kind of supervised, typological reading ...
Contents
Representing the criminal | |
The harlots progress | |
Satires rough music | |
Fielding and the discipline of fiction | |
Buttock and File | |
Other editions - View all
Literature and Crime in Augustan England Ian a Bell,Taylor & Francis Group No preview available - 2022 |