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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... concern with finding appropriate terminology to articulate it, this book should have been called something more elaborate and cautious, something much more scholarly, like The Press and its Roles in Disseminating and Resisting the Re ...
... concern for the liberty of the propertied oligarchy. Without apology or embarrassment, Blackstone proudly and rhetorically underlined the ways in which the law entitled his listeners to lead lives of unimpeded security and comfort ...
... concern. Blackstone's preferred system was one where magistrates would be local men, well-informed of the particular circumstances of cases, and sufficiently acquainted with the niceties of the law through works like Richard Burn's The ...
... concerned, since literature so often dramatises the exceptional in preference to the mundane, the remarkable in preference to the ordinary. And the whole system of selection, omission and deliberate or inadvertent distortion that goes ...
... concerned by it. If the focus of the discussion changes, then it is reasonable to assume that the audience's interests similarly change (though it remains a matter of debate whether the writing responds to a re-orientation or helps to ...
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 |