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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... suggesting a very recent deterioration in manners, adopts a rhetorical stance that can be found throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. In fact, as has been pointed out by a number of writers, the bizarre myth of a golden age of ...
... suggests that even today only around 20 per cent of criminal behaviour is discovered and reported, and there is no reason to imagine that eighteenth-century procedures of detection were any more successful.21 Any attempts to produce ...
... suggest, according to Beattie, that 'the number if anything declined over the century'.24 What we seem to be confronted with, then, is a sustained chorus of anxiety about crime, about the dangers of living in the metropolis, and about ...
... suggest that suitable sources for the study of crime during this period might be found in the contemporary press. Whatever else may be said of them individually, the law and the press together can be seen as the two central generators ...
... suggestion is that literature reflects society, with a greater or lesser degree of distortion perhaps, but with sufficient accuracy for the skilled viewer to discover the true picture. The theory of reflection has a long history, and in ...
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 |