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. |
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... as Blackstone does. On the other hand, and with more persuasive support, it could be seen as a powerful, virtually self-regulating institution, very remote from questions of individual conscience, unable to dwell on the minute.
Ian A. Bell. questions of individual conscience, unable to dwell on the minute particulars of individual cases, requiring to act by broad and imprecise principles of social utility as part of a maintained state apparatus of coercion and ...
... individual victims, it would seem more sensible to regard the criminal as an irritant to honest people rather than a menace.20 This historian's version of events is unlike anything we have encountered so far, and it needs some ...
... individuals and institutions concerned, since literature so often dramatises the exceptional in preference to the mundane, the remarkable in preference to the ordinary. And the whole system of selection, omission and deliberate or ...
... individual elements, and the omission of features thought to be irrelevant or accidental. Literature, that is to say, is always a construction, not just a revelation, a more or less deliberate act of shaping and forming, which is under ...
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 |