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Publication Date
12-13-2024
Description
In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century—with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment—did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation.
Published by Bucknell University Press.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Keywords
romantic, 1700s, 1800, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, long eighteenth century, romantic literature, Gothic, Imprisonment, Freedom, Thomas Fowler, John Howard, Foucault, William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, George Gordon, Lord Byron, S. T. Coleridge, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, The Dungeon, Penitentiary, Gaol, Penal reform, Romantic period, William Dodd, John Clare, Edward Austen Knight, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, punishment, rehabilitation, incarceration, incarcerated, Newgate, house of correction, confinement, Howardian, political prisoners, crimping house, penal legislation, modern prison, solitary confinement, seclusion, New Bayley Prison, reformed prison, John Thelwall, Elizabeth Inchbald, bridewell, Penitentiary Act of 1779, Gloucester Penitentiary, Coldbath Fields House of Correction, the Bloody Code, Jeremy Bentham
Rights
Copyright © 2025 by Jonas Cope All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837–2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684485383