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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... Courts Administration. My main intellectual obligation is to Philip J. Rawlings, of Brunei University, whose knowledge of the practices of eighteenth-century crime has been as useful to me in preparing this volume as it will prove to be ...
... place where legal practice was most elaborately formalised. Elsewhere in Britain at this time, the ecclesiastical or church courts were still relatively more prominent, prosecuting 'moral' or spiritual offences like adultery.
... courts and prisons, and the venue for the notorious activities of celebrated criminals like Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard, it was also the focus of most literary activity. This is obvious in the urbane setting of the developing ...
... courts, including service-dodging or fornication. And conversely, activities largely unremarked in the early ... court of law or summarily before an accredited agent of law enforcement'.5 There are of course problems involved in this ...
... courts did not prevent this act from seeming excessive – 'it is true, that these outrageous penalties, being seldom or never inflicted, are hardly known to be law by the public: but that rather aggravates the mischief, by laying a snare ...
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 |