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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... Reading Printed in Great Britain by TJ Press (Padstow) Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known ...
... Reading about crime Industry and idleness 2 Representing the criminal Relentless ruffians Trials and Tyburn Newgate pastoral 3 The harlot's progress Double standards The whore's rhetorick Modest proposals Women of pleasure 4 Satire's ...
... reading of works of literature will be informative not just about the internal ordering of those texts or about the workings of their authors' minds, but also about the creation and dissemination of ideology and the diversities of ...
... readers with a lurid catchpenny title and then, having relieved them of their money, scare them off, not with the sudden furious appearance of a pretended husband, but with the predictably alarming intervention of Antonio Gramsci or ...
... reading practices of the eighteenth century.2 So although the best-known novels and poems and the like will inevitably be prominent in the following discussion, and the names of the most revered authors will appear frequently, the real ...
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 |