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Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. Faller examines ways in which ordinary Englishmen read, wrote and presumably thought on the subject of criminal actions and character.
This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least as a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels, like criminal biography, provided ways of facing and working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller shows how the 'literary', even 'aesthetic' qualities of his fiction contributed to these ends. Analysing the ways in which Defoe's novels exploited, deformed and departed from the genre they imitated, this book attempts to define the specific social and political (which is to say moral and ideological) value of a given set of 'literary' texts against those of a more 'ordinary' form of narrative.
An interdisciplinary anthology of writing by and about women and the way they talk about themselves and allow others to talk about them in ways that are sometimes liberating, sometimes incriminating, but always fraught with questions of personal, and therefore political, power. Some topics include the concept of representation in the law; race and essentialism in feminist legal theory; and representing the lesbian in law and literature. Lacks an index. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Modern criminal courts are characteristically the domain of lawyers, with trials conducted in an environment of formality and solemnity, where facts are found and legal rules are impartially applied to administer justice. Recent historical scholarship has shown that in England lawyers only began to appear in ordinary criminal trials during the eighteenth century, however, and earlier trials often took place in an atmosphere of noise and disorder, where the behaviour of the crowd - significant body language, meaningful looks, and audible comment - could influence decisively the decisions of jurors and judges. This collection of essays considers this transition from early scenes of popular par...
This study argues that protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the expectations of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society, in the radical circles of the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson.
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