Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England

by John Bender

Overview

This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and 1779 helped bring about the change from traditional prisons to penitentiaries, John Bender offers studies of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's Progresses, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia as well as illustrations from prison literature, art, and architecture in support of his thesis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226042299
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/15/1989
Edition description:	1
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.38(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University, in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Imagining the Penitentiary was awarded the 1987 Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Table of Contents

Illustrations and Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Prison and the Novel as Cultural Systems
2. The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe
3. The City and the Rise of the Penitentiary: A Journal of the Plague Year
4. Generic Conflict and Reformist Discourse in Gay and Hogarth
5. Narration and "Civil Power": Jonathan Wild in Fielding's Career
6. Fielding and the Juridical Novel
7. The Aesthetic of Isolation as Social System
8. The Absorptive Tableau and the Public Execution: A Postscript on Transparency as Practice
Notes
Index