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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... contemporary ideological potency of the ideas of crime and criminals, the areas of ideological fissure they reveal, and the possible supportive and adversary roles of literature in their distribution. There are obviously a great many ...
... 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, the exotic and the mundane ...
... contemporary criminal law. Far from demonstrating the felicities of the English constitution, and enabling a gentleman to conduct his business smoothly and legitimately, the criminal statutes seemed to Blackstone to be rather rough and ...
... contemporary commentators, the law in practice might inevitably be imperfect, but at the very least it had to be better than the anarchic possibilities of total lawlessness. Broader questions of the morality of punishment, the role of ...
... contemporary commentators, often involving the anxieties created by the large number of discharged service personnel drifting about after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. In 1751, Henry Fielding's pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Causes of ...
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 |