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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... pamphlet called Hanging Not Punishment Enough made an impassioned plea for aggravated forms of the death penalty, like breaking upon the wheel. Mere hanging, it claimed, was too lenient and insufficiently fearsome for the hardened ...
... pamphlet is only one of many on similar themes, calling for increased severity in punishment to combat what the writer believes to be a flagrant unchecked growth in crime and lawlessness. Like the similarly intense calls for the ...
... pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, opened with a very bleak picture of city life: The great Increase of Robberies within these few Years, is an Evil which to me appears to deserve some attention; and ...
... pamphlets, poems, 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 ...
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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 |