Literature and Crime in Augustan England

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Original Title Page Original Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Buttock and Twang 1 Literature/crime/society Talking about the law Talking about crime Reading about crime Industry and idleness 2 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, shame, shame A hymn to the pillory 5 Fielding and the discipline of fiction The magistrate and the mob The appeal of comedy Law and disorder 6 Postscript: Buttock and File Notes Index