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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... cultural practices were portrayed, and on the significance of such representations for their producers and consumers. It is, I hope, an exercise in literary criticism at the service of wider cultural history, where the close reading of ...
... cultural study, any enterprise of this kind becomes uninformative and highly reductive, and it is by no means my intention to confine myself to this attractively privileged but narrow way of thinking. A more sympathetic and potentially ...
... cultural sign for 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 ...
... cultural dominance. In doing so, he demonstrates the ideological centrality of legislation and enforceable contracts in bourgeois society, which he saw as necessary and wholly desirable. The authoritative chapter and verse which could ...
... culture, but his language shows a very interesting reliance on ideology rather than on reality. The members of this commercial civilisation must have 'faith' and 'a certain degree of confidence' in things. That is to say, they have 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 |