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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... identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-44270-5 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-00-302027-1 (Set) ...
... identify reliable figures for crime and its perpetrators. But at the moment it is important to address an even more basic difficulty: what is crime? Anyone presently asked to give a list of crimes is likely to mention uncontentiously ...
... identifying a peculiarly virulent 'crime wave' in the Augustan period would be much more persuasive if there was some more substantial corroboration available to support it. As E. P. Thompson puts it, 'eighteenthcentury class prejudice ...
... identified. Of course, even to talk of 'facts' here is misleading. In this area, more obviously than in almost any other ... identify the rate of crime in England in the eighteenth century. The acknowledged expert in this field is J. M. ...
... identified elsewhere. Rather, they disrupt the protestations of ideologies to be something other than themselves. Most ideological writing adopts a disguise, disowning its ideological status, and pretending to be something else ...
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 |