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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... interesting reliance on ideology rather than on reality. The members of this commercial civilisation must have 'faith' and 'a certain degree of confidence' in things. That is to say, they have to believe in the efficacy of the law for ...
... interesting to notice that even Blackstone becomes much more hesitant in his treatment of contemporary criminal law. Far from demonstrating the felicities of the English constitution, and enabling a gentleman to conduct his business ...
... interesting. It looks as though he is having to confront a discourse which violates those ideals of gentlemanly conduct which the civil law enshrined and which the tone of his lectures tried to reproduce. Whereas the civil code seemed ...
... interesting when dealing with legislation and crime. Many of the 'criminal' texts which I shall go on to discuss do not simply reproduce in a more decorative way an ideological position which can be isolated and identified elsewhere ...
... interesting in the way it raises all the problems of irony. What if this point was introduced by Cleland to reveal Fanny's entertaining and incongruous innocence? After all, there is no intrinsic reason to assume that the story-teller ...
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 |