British Romanticism and Prison Reform

Jonas Cope

2024
242 pages
$49.95
ISBN 9781684485352
Transits

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century - with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment - did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation.

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Reviews
"Jonas Cope's critically acute and splendidly revelatory study traces - through a wealth of interrelated philosophical, religious, legal, literary, visual, and theoretical sources - the complex course of Romantic-era British penal reform: its origins, evolution, and afterlives in post-Romantic public culture. A must-read." -Stephen Behrendt, author of British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community

"Consistently strong readings of seven major authors in the compelling and well-defined context of Romantic-era prison reform." -Noah Heringman, author of Deep Time: A Literary History

About the author:

JONAS COPE is an associate professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism, 1820 - 1839.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684485369; EPUB: $49.95, 9781684485376