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. |
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... instructing them in their future duties as administrators, magistrates and even members of parliament. Furthermore, he was offering the promise that, while the laws of conveyancing, for example, might justly regulate the.
... offered.17 The 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 ...
... offered readers a torrent of abuse and criticism leveled at those in authority.27 Such a vociferous press, variously supportive and subversive of established authority, did much to create and disseminate ideas of and attitudes to crime ...
... offering reliable access to lost worlds. Such an attitude lies silently behind the crudest historical uses of ... offered to substantiate this argument – to assume that, say, Smollett's picture of naval life in Roderick Random is ...
... offering allegiances to different constructions of the past, present or future, rather than determining truth in a disinterested way. Perhaps that is always the way writing works in societies, and, if so, the historian's job 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 |