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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... particular circumstances of cases, and sufficiently acquainted with the niceties of the law through works like Richard Burn's The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, Giles Jacob's The Statute-Law Common-plac'd, John Mallory's The ...
... particular early eighteenth-century 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 ...
... particular combination of factors in the first half of the century made it seem, at least, as though criminal activity was on the increase. As E. P. Thompson puts it, 'if that unsatisfactory term “crime wave” could ever be used with ...
... in Dr Johnson's defence of Shakespeare as 'the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life'.33 In discussion of the novel, in particular, the image of the mirror has repeatedly been used,
Ian A. Bell. particular, the image of the mirror has repeatedly been used, in the service of the idea of 'realism'. Any notion of verisimilitude must have somewhere behind it the enabling belief that literature can accurately portray ...
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 |