Jason Haslam

Fitting Sentences

Identity in Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories. While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined as "a strategic distribution of elements" that act "to exercise a power of normalization", Haslam demonstrates some of the complex connections and dissonances between these elements and the resistances to them. Each work shows how carceral practices can be used to attack a variety of identifications, be they sexual, racial, economic, or any of a variety of social categories. By analysing the works of specific prison writers but not being limited to a single locale or narrow time span, offers a significant historical and global overview of a unique genre in literature.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Toronto Press
• 2nd edition
• Seitenzahl: 270
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Dezember 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 160mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 558g
• ISBN-13: 9780802038333
• ISBN-10: 0802038336
• Artikelnr.: 21334839

Autorenporträt

Jason Haslam is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Opening Statements
Part One: The Carceral Society
1. ‘They locked the door on my meditations’: Thoreau, Society, and the
Prison House of Identity
2. ‘Cast of Characters’: Problems of Identity and Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl
Part Two: Writing Wrongs
1. ‘To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law’: The
Paradox of the Individual in De Profundis
2. Positioning Discourse: Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City
Jail’
Part Three: Prisons, Privilege, and Complicity
3. Being Jane Warton: Lady Constance Lytton and the Disruption of Privilege
4. Frustrating Complicity in Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an
Albino Terrorist
Closing Statements / Opening Arguments
Notes
Works Cited
Index