Grass The Self in the Cell

Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-1-135-38484-5
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Reihe: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cell examines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grass, Sean C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Solitude, Surveillance, and the Art of the Novel
Chapter 1: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
Chapter 2: Prisoners by Boz: Pickwick Papers and American Notes
Chapter 3: Charles Reade, the Facts, and Deliberate Fictions
Chapter 4: "How Not to Do It": Dickens, the Prison, and the Failure of Omniscience
Chapter 5: The "Marks System": Australia and Narrative Wounding
Chapter 6: The Self in the Cell: Villette, Armadale, and Victorian Self-Narration
Conclusion: Narrative Power and Private Truth: Freud, Foucault, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Works Cited