Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England by Hal Gladfelder

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England by Hal Gladfelder

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.

It is clearly written and considers texts over a wide historical range-- Lincoln Faller Albion Gladfelder carries through his project in a series of incisive against-the-grain readings. -- Victoria Myers Wordsworth Circle 2003 An essential analysis of the criminal narratives that became part of the 18th-century English reader's experiences and their influence upon the novels that we continue to read. -- Jan Stahl East-Central Intelligencer 2004 Smart, thorough, and provocative... A unique and valuable contribution to the studies of crime literature and the eighteenth-century novel. -- Robert Dryden Eighteenth Century: Current Bibliography 2006 This is a fresh and stimulating, often original, deeply intelligent, and almost completely persuasive study. -- John J. Richetti Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 2007

Hal Gladfelder is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rochester.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780801866081
ISBN 10	0801866081
Title	Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England
Author	Hal Gladfelder
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	2001-08-10
Number of pages	296
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.