Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives - Hardcover

Jason Haslam

 
9780802038333: Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0802038336 ISBN 13: 9780802038333
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2005

Synopsis

Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories.

While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined as “a strategic distribution of elements” that act “to exercise a power of normalization”, Haslam demonstrates some of the complex connections and dissonances between these elements and the resistances to them. Each work shows how carceral practices can be used to attack a variety of identifications, be they sexual, racial, economic, or any of a variety of social categories. By analysing the works of specific prison writers but not being limited to a single locale or narrow time span, Fitting Sentences offers a significant historical and global overview of a unique genre in literature.

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About the Author

Jason Haslam is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.

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Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Publication date
2005
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0802038336
ISBN 13 
9780802038333
Binding
Hardcover
Edition number
2
Number of pages
270