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British Romanticism and Prison Reform

Jonas Cope author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bucknell University Press,U.S.

Publishing:13th Dec '24

£39.00

This title is due to be published on 13th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

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British Romanticism and Prison Reform cover

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.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Pr

ISBN: 9781684485352

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

242 pages