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Abstract
The transition from the so-called ‘old’ to the ‘new prison’ in the mid-nineteenth century entailed, as Michel Foucault has famously outlined, the move from punishment as spectacle to the creation of “docile bodies” by means of disciplinary techniques. At least in theory, this transition also replaced waiting in prison (to be released, to be publicly humiliated in the pillory, to be transported to a penal colony, to be executed) with imprisonment as punishment and as a reformatory tool. Accordingly, prisoners were precisely not supposed to wait; they were to use their time efficiently to the benefit of society at large – through work and self-reformation. Charles Dickens was among the first writers to deploy literature in order to demonstrate that, instead of the intended reformation, solitary confinement bred hypocrisy and unbearable suffering. Waiting in cellular confinement became the antithesis of the intended prison reform – not so much in terms of active and deliberate resistance but as a symptom of human suffering and misguided reformatory zeal. This chapter uses waiting as the critical lens through which to analyse narrative criticism of segregation in works by Charles Dickens, Charles Reade and John Galsworthy, and to demonstrate the continuing relevance of these works.
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the entanglements of narrative critique of and complicity with racism and sexism in two imperial middlebrow novels by the Anglo-Indian author Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Cory): Anna Lombard (1901) and Life of My Heart (1915). The author specifically considers the role of Hellenism in Cross’s narrative defamiliarisation with the dominant racial and gendered ideologies of her time.
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the entanglements of narrative critique of and complicity with racism and sexism in two imperial middlebrow novels by the Anglo-Indian author Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Cory): Anna Lombard (1901) and Life of My Heart (1915). The author specifically considers the role of Hellenism in Cross’s narrative defamiliarisation with the dominant racial and gendered ideologies of her time.
Abstract
In the world of the prison, the strong interrelation between space and wellbeing (or rather lack thereof) is perhaps more readily apparent than in most other institutions. However, gathering from the message conveyed by many ‘dark’ prison heritage sites, imprisonment today appears comparatively humane. The present chapter examines how the itv series Bad Girls (1999–2006), by contrast, highlights traces of the institution’s ‘dark’ past in the present and sharply criticizes a system that, in many respects, is detrimental to women’s health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, however, Bad Girls progressively succumbs to its generic wip heritage, and, by catering to a public fascination with ‘deviancy’, closer to the message conveyed by ‘dark heritage’ sites.
The ‘Warder’ in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination
Series:
Spatial Practices, Volume: 21
The sadistic prison ‘warder’ is an all-too-familiar figure in the literary and cultural imagination of Britain and beyond. This distorted image continues to be informed by the stereotypically oppressive gaolers of old – trailing the figurative stench of the dungeon behind them. Even today, prison officers can, for instance, function as scapegoats to compensate for society’s guilty conscience or as fictional vehicles to promote prison reform.
This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing spatial and cognitive narratological frameworks, it examines prison literature that lends a voice to prison officers and/or grants them a complex fictional representation. A review of traditional depictions of ‘warders’ in classics of prison literature prepares the ground for the discussion of contemporary prison officer memoirs and the representation of officers in fictional works by Brendan Behan, Allan Guthrie and Louise Dean.
This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing spatial and cognitive narratological frameworks, it examines prison literature that lends a voice to prison officers and/or grants them a complex fictional representation. A review of traditional depictions of ‘warders’ in classics of prison literature prepares the ground for the discussion of contemporary prison officer memoirs and the representation of officers in fictional works by Brendan Behan, Allan Guthrie and Louise Dean.
The ‘Warder’ in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination
Series:
Spatial Practices, Volume: 21
The sadistic prison ‘warder’ is an all-too-familiar figure in the literary and cultural imagination of Britain and beyond. This distorted image continues to be informed by the stereotypically oppressive gaolers of old – trailing the figurative stench of the dungeon behind them. Even today, prison officers can, for instance, function as scapegoats to compensate for society’s guilty conscience or as fictional vehicles to promote prison reform.
This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing spatial and cognitive narratological frameworks, it examines prison literature that lends a voice to prison officers and/or grants them a complex fictional representation. A review of traditional depictions of ‘warders’ in classics of prison literature prepares the ground for the discussion of contemporary prison officer memoirs and the representation of officers in fictional works by Brendan Behan, Allan Guthrie and Louise Dean.
This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing spatial and cognitive narratological frameworks, it examines prison literature that lends a voice to prison officers and/or grants them a complex fictional representation. A review of traditional depictions of ‘warders’ in classics of prison literature prepares the ground for the discussion of contemporary prison officer memoirs and the representation of officers in fictional works by Brendan Behan, Allan Guthrie and Louise Dean.
Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot’s famous attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction – a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows.
The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.
Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D’hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood
The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.
Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D’hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood
Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot’s famous attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction – a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows.
The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.
Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D’hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood
The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.
Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D’hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood
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