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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... complex cultural sign for contemporary readers, a nexus in which were brought together the seat of government and the dens of criminals, the legislature and the underworld, the triumph of civilisation and the persistence of savagery ...
... 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 rhetorically ...
... complex and might not always be capable of a benign interpretation. Blackstone acknowledged these problems but did not investigate them thoroughly. Other commentators, of a more aggressively ironic temper, could see the paradoxes much ...
... Literary works are quite obviously informed by history, and the problem for historicallyoriented critics is finding a language adequate to express the very complex relationship between texts and their various contexts without being.
Ian A. Bell. complex relationship between texts and their various contexts without being reductive or over-emphatic. Since history surrounds and infiltrates literature, and literature intervenes in history, how is their mutual ...
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 |