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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... more sympathetic and potentially more informative approach to the subject requires a less judgemental attitude to eighteenth-century writing, and I would not wish to have to keep apologising for the unwholesomeness or shabbiness of.
... less authoritative. London, too, was not only the location of the main courts and prisons, and the venue for the notorious activities of celebrated criminals like Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard, it was also the focus of most literary ...
... less certain. Since our notions of crime are tangled up with our 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 ...
... less unrestrained in a world organised for his benefit. Of course, to advance such an argument, however intelligently or fastidiously, Blackstone had to maintain a discreet silence on the subject of those less generously treated by the ...
... less uncertain and arbitrary; where all our accusations are public, and our trials in the face of the world; where torture is unknown, and every delinquent is judged by such of his equals, against whom he can form no exception nor even ...
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 |