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
Results 1-5 of 45
... literary criticism at the service of wider cultural history, where the close reading of works of literature will be informative not just about the internal ordering of those texts or about the workings of their authors' minds, but also ...
... literary value. In such a case, great novels, plays and poems alone would provide the materials, and the conclusion would be restricted to clarifying the views of certain allegedly 'great' authors on these weighty matters. As a project ...
... literary merit distorts the otherwise stimulating early essays in this field by F. W. Chandler and others, rendering them now of no more than antique or curiosity value. My scope is of necessity wider than that. I take 'literature' in ...
... literary activity. This is obvious in the urbane setting of the developing periodicals like the Tatler and Spectator and in the declared allegiances of such various relevant texts as The London Bawd, The London Jilt, The London Spy, The ...
... sensible position to me, the merest mention of 'literary sources' is enough to set the archivists roaring and falling about. J. A. Sharpe, for instance, puts the case against the use of literature in historical research as forcefully.
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 |