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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... recognised protocols and procedures of this kind of critical study. Following the established patterns of earlier commentators on historical crime, my plan was to attract gullible readers with a lurid catchpenny title and then, having ...
... recognised and accepted sanctions, like revenge, or the ritual humiliation variously known as 'rough music' or 'skimmington' or 'charivari' or 'shirrikin'. Although these had not entirely disappeared from the metropolis, as we shall see ...
... Holy Scripture, as they might still have been for less comfortable Augustans, but in the statute book. This was by no means an eccentric or idiosyncratic position. As Adam Smith recognised in The Wealth of Nations (1776), an.
Ian A. Bell. Adam Smith recognised in The Wealth of Nations (1776), an unquestioning belief in the reliability and justice of the laws of contract had been (and still was) the ideological cement which held post-agrarian society together ...
... When introducing a discussion of the 'Bloody Code', as it came to be known, his earlier urbanity and confidence begin to disappear. He has to recognise that English criminal law could and did perpetrate grotesque outrages – he.
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 |