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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... social control, is the nature of the information that is received about the behaviour in question.1 This book is a study of information about deviance, and misinformation, and disinformation. It concentrates upon the diverse ...
... Social circumstances have changed so much that the law covers different things at different times. To take a banal example first, the eighteenth century is an unexciting period for the historian of road traffic offences. More ...
... social equipment. The statutes could be relied upon to articulate bourgeois hegemony, and to reify the values of the landed classes, and keep 'inferior agents' on their guard. And that, for Blackstone (and his listeners) was the way ...
... to be far too many occasions when the mask of impartiality slipped, and the criminal law seemed to be acting aggressively 'to sustain and legitimize the established social and economic and political arrangements of the society'.5.
... social institutions of which it is a part.'6 Such Whiggish confidence in the perfectibility of law has not been borne out by the various more recent studies of the period. Whereas Radzinowicz seems assured that 'the criminal law of ...
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 |