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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... notions of literary merit aside, and enthusiastically incorporating unorthodox texts like Hogarth's prints or the Old Bailey Session Papers or Boswell's private journals. And I will be unembarrassed in my use of popular writing. As ...
... 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. Also, it is obvious that ...
... notion of a widespread criminal class stealthily at work throughout the land, a furtive and nefarious mirror-image of the frightened hardworking citizen, was a very potent idea in the eighteenth-century popular imagination. It can be ...
... notion of 'crime' and attendant groups of organised perpetrators of illegal activity becomes very uncertain. It is very important to see that these questions about crime lie in the realm of ideological fantasy rather than demonstrable ...
... notion that literature can be impartial, non-partisan, or even simply referential cannot be sustained beyond the simplest inspection. Anyone who used, say, the eighteenth-century novel as a source of unproblematic information about ...
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 |