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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... 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 in historical or cultural study, any ...
... novels and poems and the like will inevitably be prominent in the following discussion, and the names of the most revered authors will appear frequently, the real focus of attention must be the press as a whole rather than a few ...
... novels and plays. Although this seems an eminently 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 ...
... lifting citations from plays and novels to illustrate the issues they are researching. James Heath, for example, makes surprisingly casual use of Bartholomew Fair, Tom Jones and Measure for Measure in discussing the theories of.
... novel as a source of unproblematic information about eighteenth-century society could only end up with a bizarre caricature of the individuals and institutions concerned, since literature so often dramatises the exceptional in ...
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 |