Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press | ISBN: 0801866081 | edition 2001 | PDF | 296 pages | 1,07 mb
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.