Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century
© 2005
Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.
Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities.
This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 290 pages
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 0.7in x 9.0in
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Author Information
Jason Haslam is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.
Julia M. Wright is a Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University. -
Table of contents
Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright, Introduction
The Subject of Captivity
1. Jason Haslam, 'Being Jane Warton: Lady Constance Lytton and the Disruption of Privilege'
2. John Mackay, 'Form and Authority in Russian Serf Autobiography'
3. Tess Chakkalakal, 'I, hereby, vow to Read Equiano's Interesting Narrative'Captivating Discourses: Class and Nation
4. Frank Lauterbach, 'From the slums to the slums: The Delimitation of Social Identity in Late Victorian Prison narratives.'
5. Monika Fludernik, 'Stone Walls do (Not) a Prison Make: Fact and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Non-Literary Representations of Imprisonment"
6. Julia M. Wright, 'National Feeling and the Colonial Prison: Teeling's Personal Narrative'Captivating Otherness
7. Jennifer Costello Brezina, 'A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity
8. Christine Marlin, 'A Prison Officer and a Gentleman: The Prison Inspector as Imperialist Hero in the Writings of Major Arthur Griffiths (1838-1908)'
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Subjects and Courses