Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England

Released on by Hal Gladfelder
preview-18

  • Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England Book Detail

  • Author : Hal Gladfelder
  • Release Date : 2003-04-01
  • Publisher : JHU Press
  • Genre : Literary Criticism
  • Pages : 308
  • ISBN 13 : 080187565X
  • File Size : 72,72 MB
DOWNLOAD BOOK

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England by Hal Gladfelder PDF Summary

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.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

Fanny Hill in Bombay

Fanny Hill in Bombay

File Size : 52,52 MB
Total View : 5089 Views
DOWNLOAD

John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His

The Beggar's Opera and Polly

The Beggar's Opera and Polly

File Size : 85,85 MB
Total View : 5010 Views
DOWNLOAD

'Gamesters and Highwaymen are generally very good to their Whores, but they are very Devils to their Wives.' With The Beggar's Opera (1728), John Gay created on

Rogues and Early Modern English Culture

Rogues and Early Modern English Culture

File Size : 4,4 MB
Total View : 7908 Views
DOWNLOAD

"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as

Systems Failure

Systems Failure

File Size : 72,72 MB
Total View : 9433 Views
DOWNLOAD

How eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations to their breaking point, showing the flaws in their design. The Enlightenm