The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) - Softcover

Grass, Sean C. C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138981621 ISBN 13: 9781138981621

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Sean Grass

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138981621
• ISBN 13: 9781138981621
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304