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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... appear frequently, the real focus of attention must be the press as a whole rather than a few tendentiously selected and unrepresentative 'universal' texts. Similar problems of demarcation and limitation surround my use of the word ...
... appear bafflingly complex and incomprehensible to the uninitiated, the body of statute was in fact covertly unified by its concern for the liberty of the propertied oligarchy. Without apology or embarrassment, Blackstone proudly and ...
... appear upon farther enquiry, that no man of sense or probity would wish to see them slackened. (i, 140) This robustly conservative version of the body of law ('our birthright ... our country'), which so outraged Bentham and the later ...
... appear frequently, and the insistent repetitions can at first sight make the case look persuasive. In 1718, the City Marshal of London announced: Now it is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffeehouses, the shop-keepers and ...
... appears to deserve some attention; and the rather as it seems (tho' already become so flagrant) not yet to have arrived to that Height of which it is capable, and which it is likely to attain: For Diseases in the Political, as in the ...
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 |