Lives of the most notorious criminals: Popular literature of crime in England, 1675--1775 [electronic resource]
說明
549 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-10, Section: A, page: 3762
Adviser: John Beattie
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto (Canada), 1999
This dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of the vast body of criminal literature—ranging from individual “lives” and “Last Dying Confessions” of the condemned, to longer collections of trials and criminal biographies—which proliferated in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Traditionally considered to “fall below the dignified historian's horizon line”, significant only insofar as it constituted an antecedent to realist fiction the novel, this literature has only in the last decade or so attracted serious academic interest. However, recent studies have tended to use this material selectively, focusing on the extent to which it can be seen as a “fit” for the preoccupations and (largely subconscious) emotional requirements of its audience, telling us less about the “real” lives of criminals than the society which produced them. However, this thesis demonstrates not only the importance of distinguishing between the different genres of criminal literature and the way in which they changed over time, but of acknowledging the degree to which such texts were invested with multiple meanings. Indeed, both the inherent ambiguity of such literature and the seemingly insatiable public interest in the lives of early eighteenth-century criminals facilitated a certain freedom of expression on the part of the condemned—who were often able to shape or even appropriate the medium of the “Last Dying Confession” for their own ends
This thesis argues that criminals themselves were willing to subscribe to a definition of crime as an individual failure of a moral order and as a product of universal human depravity—which, in the context of a world in which all people were rogues or sinners but where only a few were called upon to expiate their crimes, could be not only empowering but even faintly subversive. This relatively open forum was to close over the course of the eighteenth century as interest in the individual lives of “common” criminals waned and criminality was gradually redefined in environmental terms; however, for a brief period, the highwayman or petty pilferer was cast, not only as “Everyman”, but as a principal actor in his/her own life
