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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... present purposes, then, the term is no more than a convenient short-hand, not to be taken as strictly judgemental or overinterpretive, and great precision about when the period began or ended or fastidious discrimination between the ...
... present the institution of law as the public formalisation of a gentlemanly code of good practice, motivated largely by 'natural humanity', as Blackstone does. On the other hand, and with more persuasive support, it could be seen as a ...
... present a very different version of the period. All commentaries on the law, of course, have to be commentaries on crime, and criminal activities in themselves attracted a great deal of intense discussion. From the very beginning of the ...
... 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 interpreting it is made no easier. Given that writing is so ...
... present a repertoire of other images of equal stability and consistency. Although it might be possible to identify at least a few other obvious stereotypes – cuckolded husbands are more frequently presented as figures of scorn rather ...
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 |