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. |
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... claimed, was too lenient and insufficiently fearsome for the hardened criminals of the day, and as a result it was no longer safe to walk the streets: Were it not so, our Roads would not be so pester'd with that wicked Generation of Men ...
... claims, their attitudes were so much part of the ideological fabric of their age that virtually no-one questioned or challenged such highly contentious assumptions. Throughout the century such anxieties about the growth of crime and the ...
... claimed that as many as 115,000 people in the city – probably representing something like one in eight of the total population – were 'regularly engaged in criminal pursuits'. He broke these startling figures down into separate ...
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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 |