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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... , and as the 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.
... elaborate procession to Tyburn, or the ceremonies of the pillory, or else they had become much less authoritative. London, too, was not only the location of the main courts and prisons, and the venue for the notorious activities of ...
... elaborate and cautious, something much more scholarly, like The Press and its Roles in Disseminating and Resisting the Re-Categorisation of Certain Patterns of Legally Stigmatised Behaviour in the Southern Part of Britain at a Fairly ...
... elaborate fabric of the English legislature. His stated aims could not be simpler, or more obviously partisan – 'I think it is an undeniable position, that a competent knowledge of that society, in which we live, is the proper ...
... elaborate and fascinating argument about changes in 'penal style' and 'the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle'.11 I have no wish to quarrel with this version of events -indeed, I am much indebted to it – but I feel that both ...
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 |