Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England

Authors

Anne SchwanFollow

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Description

In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints. -- Provided by publisher.

ISBN

1611686725

Publication Date

2014

Publisher

University of New Hampshire Press

City

Durham, New Hampshire

Disciplines

English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Literature in English, British Isles | Social History | Women's History

Comments

Copyright: Anne Schwan

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 license.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Recommended Citation

Schwan, Anne, "Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England" (2014). University of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books. 2.
https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_press/2