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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... 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 rough music The grammar of punishment Shame ...
... represents a kind of Dark Age, lying in wait for the battalion of enlightened reformers like Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham ... represented class interests in a mediated and disguised form, shrouded in the majesty of ceremony and the ...
... representing something like one in eight of the total population – were 'regularly engaged in criminal pursuits'. He broke these startling figures down into separate categories, the coolness of his statistical procedure contrasting ...
... represented with differing emphases, but to much the same vitriolic end. And not only lawyers were treated this way. As Speck puts it, 'the subjects of Queen Anne seem to have pretty well agreed that all lawyers were pettifoggers who ...
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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 |