Read more
This book describes how literature depicts imprisonment in a wealth of metaphors of confinement in literature from the late middle ages to the present day. As well as carceral metaphors the volume explores how notions of imprisonment extend to other situations such as jobs, marriage, and ideology.
List of contents
- Introduction: Prisons, Images of Confinement and the Carceral Imaginary
- 1: The Prison as World: The World as Prison: Similitudes and Homologies
- 2: Poeta in Vinculis I: Textualizations of the Carceral Experience
- 3: Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century
- 4: Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons: From the Happy Prison to Strangulation by Domesticity
- 5: The Prison as Cage: Abjection and Transcendence
- 6: The Cancer of Punitivity: Prisons of Slavery and Hell
- 7: Industry and Idleness: Discipline and Punishment in the Capitalist Prison
- 8: Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison
- 9: Prisons of Femininity
- 10: Conclusions: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Carcerality
- Appendix
- Works Cited
About the author
Monika Fludernik is Professor of English at the University of Freiburg. Her areas of research are narratology, postcolonial theory, Law and Literature studies, and the eighteenth century. Her teaching covers the whole breadth of English literature from the Middle Ages to the present, including poetry, drama, and narrative prose. Monika Fludernik was the director of the collaborative research centre "Identities and Alterities" (SFB 541) and is currently the director of a graduate school (GRK 1767) on "Factual and Fictional Narration". In addition to her monographs and numerous edited volumes, she has published over one hundred essays, the majority in refereed journals such as Style, Narrative, Poetics Today, Journal of Literary Semantics, Text, Semiotica, Language and Literature, The Journal of Pragmatics, Diacritics, English Literary History, PMLA and The James Joyce Quarterly. She is a member of the Austrian Academy of Science and the Academia Europaea.
Summary
This book describes how literature depicts imprisonment in a wealth of metaphors of confinement in literature from the late middle ages to the present day. As well as carceral metaphors the volume explores how notions of imprisonment extend to other situations such as jobs, marriage, and ideology.
Additional text
Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates on the ethics of imprisonment, on the role of the prison in society and in the cultural imaginary, and on the relations between law and literature from the early modern period to the present. It is a formidable piece of scholarship, wide-ranging in the scope of its research and innovative in its methodology; it is also passionate in its ethical and political commitments, and subtle and learned in its readings of a rich array of fascinating texts. Monika Fludernik's magisterial study will make its mark as an essential point of reference for any future discussion of prisons and prison literature.
