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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... popular writing. As Raymond Williams has demonstrated, an all-embracing use of the word 'literature', associating it with 'literacy' rather than with 'literariness' is peculiarly appropriate to the publishing and reading practices of ...
... popular imagination. It can be seen in all these examples I have quoted, and in many others as well. Unfortunately, some influential historians have taken such statements out of their ideological context, and simply reproduced them as ...
... popular perceptions of or attitudes towards illegal behaviour. This apparent failure has led one writer to describe the pursuit of reliable statistics in this field as 'something of a dead end', but that does seem unduly harsh.26 ...
... popular attitudes and behaviour draws heavily on literary sources, and shows all the challenging and attractive possibilities and impediments of this method. At times, he is at pains to sound even-handed and judicious, using selected ...
... popular imagination'.41 I have argued elsewhere that this kind of supervised, typological reading, where the meaning of specific texts accrues from similarities to, and differences from, acknowledged generic forms is particularly ...
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 |