The Self in the Cell by Sean C Grass

The Self in the Cell by Sean C Grass

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Summary

This work examines the emergence of the separate confinement penitentiary in England, the demand for autobiography that the prison imposed and the ways the prison's demand for self narrative shaped Victorian novels about the private self.

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The Self in the Cell by Sean C Grass

Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cellexamines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.
Sean Grass is the author of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2003) and essays on Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Christina Rossetti, among others. He is an Associate Professor of English at Iowa State University, USA.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780415943550
ISBN 10 0415943558
Title The Self in the Cell
Author Sean C Grass
Series Literary Criticism And Cultural Theory
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Year published 2003-03-21
Number of pages 304
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.