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British Romanticism and Prison Reform

British Romanticism and Prison Reform

Paperback

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Literary CriticismCriminologyBritish History

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ISBN10: 1684485355
ISBN13: 9781684485352
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Dec 13 2024
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

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.

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Literary Criticism