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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... creation and dissemination of ideology and the diversities of cultural practice. By investigating the kind of information the Augustan public received from its press about deviance and deviants, I want to explore the contemporary ...
... created. His exposition is an elegant, seemingly effortless attempt to bolster belief, to disseminate confidence, to reassure his audience that the laws of England had their best interests at heart. He was demonstrating to them their ...
... created by a distant and occasionally ill-informed or partisan Parliament, gave him cause for concern. Blackstone's preferred system was one where magistrates would be local men, well-informed of the particular circumstances of cases ...
... 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 the Late Increase of Robbers, opened with a very bleak ...
... creation of an elaborate scare about growing criminality and an organised criminal class. To put it bluntly, laws would more easily be brought in, and receive more widespread public assent, if they were thought to be in defence of the ...
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 |