Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Hal Gladfelder
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187565X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Hal Gladfelder
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187565X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.

Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England

Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England PDF Author: Frank McLynn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136093087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
McLynn provides the first comprehensive view of crime and its consequences in the eighteenth century: why was England notorious for violence? Why did the death penalty prove no deterrent? Was it a crude means of redistributing wealth?

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: D. Rabin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790

The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790 PDF Author: Joe Lines
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815655193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
With characteristic lawlessness and connection to the common man, the figure of the rogue commanded the world of Irish fiction from 1660 to 1790. During this period of development for the Irish novel, this archetypal figure appears over and over again. Early Irish fiction combined the picaresque genre, focusing on a cunning, witty trickster or pícaro, with the escapades of real and notorious criminals. On the one hand, such rogue tales exemplified the English stereotypes of an unruly Ireland, but on the other, they also personified Irish patriotism. Existing between the dual publishing spheres of London and Dublin, the rogue narrative explored the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations. In this volume, Lines investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. Alongside recognized works of Irish fiction, such as those by William Chaigneau, Richard Head, and Charles Johnston, Lines presents lesser-known and even anonymous popular texts. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogues themselves, marked by persistence and adaptability, and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680–1760

Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680–1760 PDF Author: Kirsten T. Saxton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317090217
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Arguing that the female criminal subject was central to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten T. Saxton provides fresh and convincing insights into the deeply complex ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersected in the long eighteenth century. She offers the figure of the murderess as evidence of the constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century legal and fictional texts, comparing non-fiction representations of homicidal women in biographies of Newgate Ordinaries and in trial reports with those in the early novels of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. As Saxton demonstrates that legal narratives informed the budding genre of the novel and fictional texts shaped the development of legal narratives, her study of deadly plots becomes a feminist intervention in scholarship on the literature of crime that simultaneously insists on the centrality of crime literature in feminist histories of the novel. Her epilogue shows that more than two centuries later, we still contend with displays of female violence that defy and define our notions of textual and sexual license and continue to shape legal and literary mandates, even as the lines between the real and the fictive remain blurred.

The Art of Alibi

The Art of Alibi PDF Author: Jonathan H. Grossman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801867552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In The Art of Alibi, Jonathan Grossman reconstructs the relation of the novel to nineteenth-century law courts. During the Romantic era, courthouses and trial scenes frequently found their way into the plots of English novels. As Grossman states, "by the Victorian period, these scenes represented a powerful intersection of narrative form with a complementary and competing structure for storytelling." He argues that the courts, newly fashioned as a site in which to orchestrate voices and reconstruct stories, arose as a cultural presence influencing the shape of the English novel. Weaving examinations of novels such as William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, along with a reading of the new Royal Courts of Justice, Grossman charts the exciting changes occurring within the novel, especially crime fiction, that preceded and led to the invention of the detective mystery in the 1840s. -- John Sutherland, University College London

Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation

Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation PDF Author: G. Morgan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230000878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This is the first major study of the convict in the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. It concentrates on the diverse characters of the transported men, women and children, and their fate in the colonies, exploring at the local level the contrasts in sentencing, shipping and settlement of convicts in America. The central myths about transportation prevalent in the eighteenth century, particularly that most felons returned, are examined in the context of the burgeoning print culture of criminal biographies and newspaper stories. In addition, the exchange of representations between the two sides of the Atlantic, and the changing American reaction to convicts, are placed within the growing transatlantic debate on transportation before the American Revolution. Above all, the realities of escape, of convicts running away and returning to England, are subject to systematic investigation for the first time.

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates PDF Author: Erin Mackie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801890888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Chloe Wigston Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035007
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.

The Appearance of Truth

The Appearance of Truth PDF Author: Judith Moore
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874134940
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"On 1 January 1753 Elizabeth Canning, an eighteen-year-old maidservant, disappeared somewhere between her uncle's and her mother's home. Nearly a month later she reappeared at her mother's door; she was half-naked, emaciated, unable even to swallow. Elizabeth's neighbors rallied around her with medical and legal support, and when they pieced together her story of assault, kidnapping, and detention, they pursued her assailants. Susannah Wells, an Enfield woman, was soon identified as the owner of the house where Canning said she had been held; Canning identified Mary Squires, a gypsy woman resident in Wells's house, as the person who had stripped her of her stays and thrust her into the derelict attic from which she had eventually escaped." "Eighteenth-century criminal proceedings were swift: Squires was sentenced to hang within a month of being charged, and Wells was branded and imprisoned. Lord Mayor Sir Crisp Gascoyne of London had presided at their trial, but he was dissatisfied with the verdict. He began to collect evidence that would provide an alibi for Mary Squires. Other prominent figures were drawn into the complexities of the case, among them the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding, who saw Canning as a figure of injured innocence, as well as Dr. John Hill, an enemy of Fielding and a journalist, who presented her as a scheming sexual adventuress." "Public controversy over the case grew rapidly inflamed. Although Wells remained in jail, Squires was pardoned, and Canning was charged with and ultimately convicted of perjury. Her trial, one of the longest in the eighteenth century, presented evidence placing Mary Squires in Enfield, where Canning said she was, and in Dorsetshire, at the same time. The case was ultimately decided not on the contradictory alibi evidence but by the judge's instructions to the jury to convict. Canning was sentenced to transportation, and she ultimately lived out the remainder of her life in Wethersfield, Connecticut, leaving the unanswered questions of her case to the many contemporary and subsequent authors who have written about it." "This study examines both the trial record and the various accounts of the Canning case. Issues of probability, class, gender, and, most importantly, narrative truth and authority are all central to this reanalysis of the notorious case."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved