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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... context, and simply reproduced them as incontestable fact. Basil Williams, for instance, in the original Oxford History of England, talks blithely of 'a large idle or criminal class who earned a precarious subsistence by their ...
... context, and talk about the written word as something other than the unsullied product of a singular imagination ... 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 ...
... context, Crabbe is probably a reliable enough witness, but it would be reassuring to see some more tangible support for his isolated remarks. Where Stone goes completely to pieces, however, is when he starts seeing not only his various ...
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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 |