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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... ideas of crime and criminals, the areas of ideological fissure they reveal, and the possible supportive and adversary roles of literature in their distribution. There are obviously a great many areas of uncertainty and trepidation in ...
... ideas of wrongful behaviour (an adjacent, but never exactly identical category) and our perception of illegality, our definition of crime is bound to be idiosyncratic. Also, it is obvious that there is a historical dimension in the ...
... idea in the eighteenth-century popular imagination. It can be seen in all these examples I have quoted, and in many others as well. Unfortunately, some influential historians have taken such statements out of their ideological context ...
... ideas of and attitudes to crime and legality in early eighteenth-century England. Since crime was one of the pressure points of ideology, if I may put it that way, the press can give us access to both the conservative and the more ...
... idea that literature is somehow more true than history still lingers on despite all the efforts of modern literary theorists to dislodge it. For some traditionalist and highminded literary critics, historians may make agreeable ...
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 |