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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... kind of information the Augustan public received from its press about deviance and deviants, I want to explore the contemporary ideological potency of the ideas of crime and criminals, the areas of ideological fissure they reveal, and ...
... kind of critical study. Following the established patterns of earlier commentators on historical crime, my plan was to attract gullible readers with a lurid catchpenny title and then, having relieved them of their money, scare them off ...
... kind of Dark Age, lying in wait for the battalion of enlightened reformers like Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Howard, Sir Samuel Romilly, William Eden, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Sir James Mackintosh and Elizabeth Fry – names ...
... kind of measurement of fluctuation is possible, even if the base figure of offences committed must always remain elusive.25 The confidence exhibited by Beattie and Hay is exhilarating, even if the eventual results seem less exciting. At ...
... kind of administrative history, revealing much about the way legal institutions have operated but comparatively little about popular perceptions of or attitudes towards illegal behaviour. This apparent failure has led one writer to ...
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 |