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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... The grammar of punishment Shame, shame, shame A hymn to the pillory 5 Fielding and the discipline of fiction The magistrate and the mob The appeal of comedy 6 Law and disorder Postscript: Buttock and File Notes Index.
... fictional careers should not be accepted too literally.34 No, indeed not. It is a sad fact that the plays of Oscar Wilde cannot be taken as wholly reliable historical documents, unless we wish to argue that nineteenth-century railway ...
... fiction. If her views on money and marriage are to be taken as typical, which features of her experience are to be seen as idiosyncratic, and by what criteria are they distinguishable? Stone seems impelled by the logic of his argument ...
... fiction might be an idiosyncratic feature of the character's personality, or there might be some overall ironic structure controlled by the author which could make isolated extracts unrepresentative. One promising way of trying to avoid ...
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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 |