Research Catalog

Title

Stones of law, bricks of shame : narrating imprisonment in the Victorian age / edited by Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach.

Publication

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, ©2009.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Lauterbach, Frank.
• Alber, Jan, 1973-

Description

vi, 289 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• "The prison system was one of the primary social issues of the Victorian era and a regular focus of debate among the period's reformers, novelists, and poets. Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame brings together essays from a broad range of scholars, who examine writings on the Victorian prison system that were authored not by inmates, but by thinkers from the respectable middle class.
• Studying the ways in which writings on prisons were woven into the fabric of the period, the contributors consider the ways in which these works affected inmates, the prison system, and the Victorian public. Contesting and extending Michel Foucault's ideas on power and surveillance in the Victorian prison system, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame covers texts from Charles Dickens to Henry James. This essential volume will refocus future scholarship on prison writing and the Victorian era."--Pub. desc.

Subject

• 1800-1899
• 1800-1900
• Geschichte 1837-1901
• English fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• Imprisonment in literature
• Imprisonment > Social aspects > History > Great Britain > 19th century
• 15.70 history of Europe
• English fiction
• Imprisonment > Social aspects
• Englisch
• Gefängnis Motiv
• Literatur
• Imprisonment
• Literature (fiction and non fiction)
• Great Britain
• United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
• Englisch

Genre/Form

• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction / Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach -- Victims or vermin? Contradictions in Dickens's penal philosophy / David Paroissien -- New prisons, new criminals, new masculinity: Dickens and Reade / Jeremy Tambling -- Facing a mirror: Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a thug and the politics of imperial self-incrimination / Matthew Kaiser -- 'Now, now, the door was down': Dickens and excarceration, 1841-2 / Adam Hansen -- Irish prisoners and the indictment of British rule in the writings of William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope / Laura Berol -- The poetics of 'pattern penitence': 'pet prisoners' and plagiarized selves / Anna Schur -- Prisoners and prisons in reform tracts of the mid-century / W.B. Carnochan -- Great expectations, self-narration, and the power of the prison / Sean C. Grass -- From 'dry volumes of facts and figures' to stories of 'flesh and blood': the prison narratives of Frederick William Robinson / Anne Schwan -- The sensational prison and the (un)hidden hand of punishment / Jason Haslam -- Prisons of stone and mind: Henry James's The princess Casamassima and In the cage / Greta Olson -- Epilogue: female confinement in Sarah Waters's neo-Victorian fiction / Rosario Arias.

ISBN

• 9780802098979
• 0802098975

LCCN

2010286294

OCLC

• ocn271433220
• 271433220
• SCSB-14512867

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library