Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform

Clicks: 1
ID: 288014
2025
Free PDF
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal

Ranked #531 of 1,244 articles by views in ADVANCES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 1,244 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
Drawing on an array of literary, penological, archival, and visual sources, this study explores the abundance of prison scenes in the eighteenth-century British novel. Revealing the four distinct prison cultures of the period, it illuminates how the narrative and ideological meanings of these institutions have been distorted by our long-held fascination with the criminal penitentiaries of the nineteenth century. Ranging from the early Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate to the prison sackings of the Gordon Riots of 1780, what emerges are not narratives of interiority and autonomous individuation, but something like the opposite of this: tales that stress the interdependence and sociality of eighteenth-century selfhood. Contextualising the carceral scenes of writers like Defoe, Haywood, Sterne, Smollett, and the Fieldings, Prison and the Novel invites us to rethink familiar accounts of the novel as a form, and of what it means to spend time inside.
Reference Key
persistent_1761420142_68fd236e16207 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Lucy Powell
Journal ADVANCES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE
Year 2025
DOI
10.1017/9781009608534
URL
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/prison-and-the-novel-in-eighteenthcentury-britain/92E5066AEB4BB0CDF368C594B6DE48DD
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.