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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... give a list of crimes is likely to mention uncontentiously illegal violent acts like murder or rape and other obvious cases like larcenies. But even here there are areas of uncertainty, like the killing of enemy troops in wartime or the ...
... give to a rich; they bestow on the dissolute the labour of the industrious; and put into the hands of the vicious the means of harming both themselves and others. The whole scheme, however, of law and justice is advantageous to the ...
... gives us some purchase on the slippery slopes of historical reconstruction. However, what this archival work cannot reveal is the contemporary climate of opinion surrounding the legal system, the pressures it was under to rectify or ...
... give us access to both the conservative and the more radical arguments at their most fully developed and articulate. And although contemporary newspapers and journals are perhaps the most immediate forms of commentary, attention should ...
... give the whole picture, or even an accurate part of it. Writers do not invariably act as faithful amanuenses, but as ardent reactionaries or agents provocateurs, their works being relatively nostalgic or progressive as they articulate ...
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 |