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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... rough music The grammar of punishment Shame, shame, shame A hymn to the pillory 5 Fielding and the discipline of fiction The magistrate and the mob The appeal of comedy 6 Law and disorder Postscript: Buttock and File Notes Index.
... punishments. Throughout the century, more and more offences, including apparently trivial ones, could be punished by death, although a certain amount of discretion could be exercised in sentencing. The most notorious piece of ...
... punishment, the role of the state, and the relationship between the law and ethics were widely and frequently discussed throughout the Augustan period, attracting the attention of theologians, philosophers, pamphleteers, poets ...
... 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 criminals of the day, and as a ...
... punishment to combat what the writer believes to be a flagrant unchecked growth in crime and lawlessness. Like the similarly intense calls for the introduction of even more elaborate methods of execution in George Ollyffe's An Essay ...
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 |