Download or read book Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth Century England written by Hal Gladfelder and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth century England written by Hal Gibson Gladfelder and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England written by Frank McLynn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?
Download or read book Identity Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth Century England written by D. Rabin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-10-20 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Turned to Account written by Lincoln B. Faller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-09-25 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. Faller examines ways in which ordinary Englishmen read, wrote and presumably thought on the subject of criminal actions and character.
Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England written by Frank McLynn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?
Download or read book The Representation of Crime in Writing in Eighteenth century England written by Hayat Diyen and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries written by Erin Sheley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.
Download or read book Narratives of Women and Murder in England 1680 1760 written by Kirsten T. Saxton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Art of Alibi written by Jonathan H. Grossman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-01-23 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Criminal Transportation written by G. Morgan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-12-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Women Work and Clothes in the Eighteenth Century Novel written by Chloe Wigston Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.
Download or read book True crimes in eighteenth century China written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little-examined genre of legal case narratives is represented in this fascinating volume, the first collection translated into English of criminal cases - most involving homicide - from late imperial China. These true stories of crimes of passion, family conflict, neighborhood feuds, gang violence, and sedition are a treasure trove of information about social relations and legal procedure. Each narrative describes circumstances leading up to a crime and its discovery, the appearance of the crime scene and the body, the apparent cause of death, speculation about motives and premeditation, and whether self-defense was involved. Detailed testimony is included from the accused and from witnesses, family members, and neighbors, as well as summaries and opinions from local magistrates, their coroners, and other officials higher up the chain of judicial review. Officials explain which law in the Qing dynasty legal code was violated, which corresponding punishment was appropriate, and whether the sentence was eligible for reduction. These records began as reports from magistrates on homicide cases within their jurisdiction that were required by law to be tried first at the county level, then reviewed by judicial officials at the prefectural, provincial, and national levels, with each administrator adding his own observations to the file. Each case was decided finally in Beijing, in the name of the emperor if not by the monarch himself, before sentences could be carried out and the records permanently filed. All of the cases translated here are from the Qing imperial copies, most of which are now housed in the First Historical Archives, Beijing.
Download or read book Crime Writing in Interwar Britain written by Victoria Stewart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering a range of neglected material, this book provides a richer view of how crime and criminality were understood between the wars.
Download or read book The Appearance of Truth written by Judith Moore and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book Writing British Infanticide written by Jennifer Thorn and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing British Infanticide tracks the ways that the circulation of narratives of child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Britain shaped perceptions and punishments of the crime and, more elusively, hierarchies of class and gender. The essays brought together in this volume pose the question: How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the overlap of an expanding print culture with the widely evident narration of this particular crime? Further, what are we to make of the recurrent and remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as the special province of unmarried, desparate women? Focussing on specific instances of the transformative effect of the circulation of narratives of child-murder, 'Writing British Infanticide' takes as its purview not child-murder per se but the ways that writing about its credentialed and differentiated writers in different, but often overlapping, genres and moments in a key period in the expansion of print. Jennifer Thorn is an Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.
Download or read book Narrating Transgression written by Rosamaria Loretelli and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1999 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime and the criminal are amongst the outstanding discourses of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English written culture, a subject to be found in ballads, sermons, biographies, case histories, dying speeches, newspaper articles, accounts of trials, Newgate Ordinary reports, paintings and etchings, poems, comedies and novels. It is this printed material that the essays in the present collection approach, somewhat obliquely, searching for hidden meanings and unavowed aims. The result is an opening up of new perspectives: not only on the various attitudes towards particular crimes and particular types of criminal - such as thieves, 'sodomites' and prostitutes - but also on cultural control as enacted by the various literary and visual genres. New insights are achieved into seventeenth and eighteenth-century mentalities, into perception of the marginal, and into the very idea of the human being.
