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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... shows a very interesting reliance on ideology rather than on reality. The members of this commercial civilisation must have 'faith' and 'a certain degree of confidence' in things. That is to say, they have to believe in the efficacy of ...
... show, it is possible to use documents as selectively as Foucault does to 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 ...
... show the precarious, provisional nature of the whole exercise. Although some other writers have been confident enough to talk of a decline in crime after the 1760s, any such estimate must be of necessity unreliable.23 The paradoxes ...
... any protestation of disinterest by an author should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Our knowledge of the political role of the Augustan press shows that it was inherently ideological, both in its 'static' and its 'dynamic'
... show that finality and fixity must be sought but cannot be found. I will go into this in more detail later, but for the moment we need to ask if a study of literature can ever be anything other than the exploration of disappointingly ...
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 |