Prison Literature Research Articles

Human rights, suffering, and aesthetics in political prison literature

Human rights, suffering, and aesthetics in political prison literature

Review: Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature edited by Yenna Wu and Simona Livescu

Human Rights, Suffering and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature is a collection of essays seeking to explore political prison literature from the vantage point of the beauty and symbolism of the writings. The essays deals with the experiences of political prisoners from countries as diverse as China, Egypt, Syria, Uruguay, Morocco, Romania, the United States and Canada with varying amounts of success.

Freedom and Dissidence in the Arabic Prison Novels of 'Abd al-Ramān Munīf

Abstract'Abd al-Rahmān Munīf 's novels East of the Mediterranean and Here and Now or East of the Mediterranean Revisited belong to the genre of prison literature, which describes the life and the suffering of prisoners. The suffering of the heroes in these novels, who are political prisoners, stems less from their physical torment than from the denial of freedom, which is a central theme in Munīf 's works. These protagonists' political activity is anchored in their desire to establish a state founded upon liberty, justice and honesty. They are authentic heroes, whose authenticity is manifest in their ceaseless struggle to preserve their identity and to become fully aware of the meaning of their existence as human beings, as well as in their willingness to take responsibility, to risk themselves and even to sacrifice their lives for their cause of attaining liberty, and in their complete dedication to this type of existence, which reflects an inner strength and a readiness to confront fate. The novels address the issue of freedom from both the existential perspective and the moral-political one. The dictatorial regime creates an absurd reality whereby the individual who struggles for freedom is sent to jail, where he experiences a yearning for both personal and collective freedom.

The Prison in Early Modern Drama

Prison scenes and references to incarceration are ubiquitous in early modern drama, ranging from the Counter-scene in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, to Hamlet’s famous statement that ‘Denmark’s a prison’. This article considers the reason for the early modern obsession with incarceration, providing a survey of the influence of contemporary prison legislation and conditions on city comedies; the use of chronicles and martyrologies in the writing of history plays; and the linguistic traces of prison literature and literary tropes of imprisonment. In doing so, it demonstrates that many of the recurring features in those plays deemed to be influenced by contemporary London prisons – including the representation of the prison as corrupt and variable in its administration, as unjust or lacking in power – have analogues in earlier literary and historical works.

Monster, Dreams, and Cultural Studies: Exploring Gang Memoir and Political Autobiography

Introduction In 1995, Barack Obama published Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. The memoir details his multicultural upbringing in Indonesia and Hawaii, his college education on West and East coasts of United States, and his work as an innercity community organizer in Chicago prior to attending law school. The influential York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani, has since deemed Obama's story the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president (From Books). Two years earlier in 1993, literary world had been excitedly discussing Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member. Kakutani contended attests not only to Mr. Shakur's journalistic eye for observation, but also to his novelistic skills as a story-teller.... This is a startling and galvanic book (Illuminating). Written from inside prison, is an account of gangbanging with one of infamous AfricanAmerican gangs in South Central Los Angeles (LA) during 1980s. The memoir tells story of how Shakur (born Kody Scott) earned nickname Monster for his brutal behavior before undergoing a political and personal transformation. is noteworthy for its emphasis on both frisson of violent gang exploits and sober, salutary reflection of politicized and educated hindsight. Born in 1961, only two years earlier than Shakur, Obama grew up in same America as gangbanger. In 1983, as Shakur was fully immersed in Eight-Trays Crips set, Obama was becoming a community worker, disgusted with White House where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds and convinced that change needed to be effected at grassroots level (133). As Shakur was becoming familiar with jails and prisons of LA and California, Obama was volunteering to help black youths on streets of Altgeld Gardens and other housing projects in Windy City. Unlike Shakur's more lumpen worldview, Obama's liberal, yet structural critique toward healthcare, education, immigration, and cultural sensitivities (emphasized further in his 2006 collection of essays, The Audacity of Hope), suggest that he is a product of 1960s more radical moment. Obama's exploration of social problems in America has led him to significantly different conclusions to Shakur who states that separation may be a solution for failure of positive multicultural existence in United States (382). Despite obvious disparities between two, there are some suggestive and fruitful parallels to be made between President's own frank coming-of-age story and Shakur's violent and seemingly sensationalized tales. Such similarities are particularly notable in terms of memoirs' narrative structure, their emphasis on language and literacy skills, and politics of racial representation. Both texts were released in chaotic aftermath of 1993 LA riots; an event which, as discussed in Monster, revealed difficulties and complexities of being a young African-American man in urban America. In academic realm, this was a particularly poignant moment for British Cultural Studies, with fervent debates in field of race representational politics being prompted by Stuart Hall's innovative essays New Ethnicities (1988) and What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture? (1992).1 Although British Cultural Studies was thriving by 1960s, this article will situate and Dreams in some of more recent interventions and developments in discipline, as well as life writing and prison literature criticism in late 1980s and early 1990s. Cultural Studies was often identified as being split between and culturalism. The former references operations of discursive power and constraints on individuals. Indeed, structuralism literally determined underlying structures that made meaning possible, exploring how meaning was produced and reproduced by dominant ideologies within a culture. …

“Leisure to Make Rhymes”: St. Thomas More as English Poet

Part One SCHOLAR, LAWYER, HUMANIST, WIT, Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII, martyr and canonized saint, Thomas More was also probably the most prolific writer of English literature in the early Tudor period, as the now completed Yale Edition of his writings attests. (1) His reputation as an author has of course been chiefly associated with his Latin masterpiece, Utopia (1516), (2) one of the seminal works of the Western literary tradition, which has provided both name and model for the numerous ideal commonwealths that have been imagined, and on occasion attempted in practice, from that day up to the present. His History of King Richard III, (3) written (c. 1514) in both English and Latin versions in order to reach More's two principal audiences of fellow countrymen and continental humanists, marks the beginning of modern historical writing in England; though unfinished and unpublished in More's lifetime, it found its way into the sixteenth-century chronicles and served as the principal source for Shakespeare's play. More's early classical studies resulted not only in his Latin epigrams, many translated from Greek originals, but in the translations undertaken with Erasmus of some works of Lucian, (4) the master of Greek dialogue who proved to be fruitful stimulus for the original work of both great humanists, in particular for the Utopia and for Erasmus's Encomium Moriae (The Praise of Folly), (5) the title of which is punning tribute to his friend. Much of the literary activity of More's mature years, which were largely absorbed by affairs of state, was concerned with the controversies of the early Reformation, beginning with his Latin Responsio (1523) to Martin Luther's attacks on Henry VIII's treatise on the sacraments. (6) The best of this work is certainly the first written in English, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529; 1531), (7) in which More employs his favorite literary form to discredit the religious innovations entering England from the continent. Described by C. S. Lewis as perhaps the best specimen of Platonic dialogue ever produced in English, (8) this work was followed in rapid succession by series of polemical works in which the literary dimension is less in evidence: The Supplication of Souls (1529); The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (1532; 1533), massive two-part sequel to the Dialogue; The Apology of Sir Thomas More, Knight (1532); The Debellation of Salem and Bizance (1532); The Answer to Poisoned Book (1533). (9) A more meditative focus, which had already shown itself in the materials translated and adapted as The Life of Pico (c. 1505) and in the unfinished meditation on the Last Things (c. 1522), (10) was given greater opportunity for expression in the Treatise on the Passion (1533-34), (11) written after More's retirement from public life, and particularly in the important works written after he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in April 1534. His greatest English work, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, (12) is classic of prison literature, revealing in fictional form the profound significance of Christian faith in the face of suffering and persecution. More's final work, the Latin DeTristitia Christi (The Sadness of Christ), (13) which survives in holograph manuscript smuggled from his cell, is series of very personal meditations on Christ's agony before the Passion, and provides an intimate picture of More's own mind as he faced impending execution. Not to be omitted from consideration of More's literary works are his letters, (14) in Latin and English, which range from defenses of Christian humanism and the great correspondence with Erasmus, the primary figure of that movement and More's other self, through various letters concerned with political and diplomatic matters to the moving letters to his own family, particularly those written during his imprisonment, (15) which give primary witness to that integrity of conscience that brought More to the block and made him a man for all seasons. …

Ovid in Rushdie, Rushdie in Ovid: A Nexus of Artistic Webs

Ovid in Rushdie, Rushdie in Ovid: A Nexus of Artistic Webs IOANNIS ZIOGAS Itmayseemridiculously romantic, butI wasactually strengthened bythehistory ofliterature. Ovidinexile, Dostoyevsky infront of thefiring squad,Genet injail - andlookwhatthey did:theMetamorphoses , Crime andPunishment ,everything that Genet wrote is prison literature. I thought, Well, ifthey cando it,I canhavea go atdoing it. - Rushdie, ParisReview interview, January i, 2008. TAwo thousand yearsafter theemperor Augustus relegatedOvid to thefringes of thethenknownworld, SalmanRushdieseestheRoman poetas a sourceofcourage forhim.IncludedwithDostoyevsky's most-readnovel and Genet'sso-calledprisonliterature, theMetamorphoses is not simplya learnedand colorfulmythological compendiumof metamorphic tales,but - Rushdie'sline - a subversive work that bespeaks the crime and punishmentof the artist. Rushdie'sengagement with Ovid is farfrom"ridiculously romantic"and starts yearsbefore thenotorious fatwa . Inthe seventies and eighties, whenmostclassicalscholarsthought of Ovid as a playfuland naivepoet who had no interest in politics,Rushdiewas a keen readerof the deeplypolitical natureofOvid's work. Thereis an intricate literary and politicalnexus between Ovid and Rushdie:first, theekphrasisofeighteen shawlsin Rushdie'snovelShame(publishedin 1983), based on Ovid's Arachneepisode;thenRushdie'sadaptationofArachneas a way ofinterpreting theMetamorphoses , Shame becominga way intoOvid's own performance. Finally, one ofRushdie's centralconcerns,whichhe sees in Ovid's career,is thepoliARION 19. 1SPRING/SUMMER 20II 24 OVIDINRUSHDIE, RUSHDIEINOVID ticsofcensorship, whichI willfocuson inthelastsectionof thispaper. I. RANIAND ARACHNE through an overarching studyoftherelationship between shameand violence,Shameportrays thereligiousand political upheavalduringthebirthof a country called Peccavistan .The country ofsin(Peccavistan)can be easilyidentified withPakistan,whichis oftentranslated as "theland ofthe pure."1The riseand downfallofIskanderHarappa and the militarydictatorshipof General Raza Hyder occupy the mainpartofthenoveland are actuallythethinly disguised storiesofZulfikarAli Bhuttoand GeneralZia ul-Haq. Despiteitsliterary value,2or perhapsbecause of it,thenovel was bannedinPakistan. Critics have pointed out that women are crucial to Shame'snarrative.3 Genderbecomesa platform of political critiqueina novelwhichfilters nationalhistory through two competing family dynasties; "thewomenseemto havetaken over,"saysthenarrator, "theymarchedin fromtheperipheriesofthestory to demandinclusionoftheir owntragedies, historiesand comedies" {Shame, 173)A Althoughtheyare repressed, secluded,and imprisoned, thewomenofthenovel arealwayspowerful. One ofthesourcesoftheir poweristhe abilityto givetheirown femaleaccountof themale-dominated arena of politicalrivalry. Rani, widow of the fallen tyrant IskanderHarappa, exemplifies the power of female narrative as she givesherversionof herhusband'srule by weavingeighteen marvelousshawls. After theexecutionofIskander, Rani and herdaughter Arjumandare exiled and confinedunderhouse arrestforsix years.Duringtheseyears,Rani completeshershawls,"the mostexquisitepiecesshe evercreated"(200). In thebeginning ,CaptainIjazz, thechiefwarderofthewomen,had deniedRani needlesand thread,butRani "shamedhimout of thatquicklyenough." "What do you suppose?" she asked loannis Ziogas 25 him,"WillI hangmyself, perhaps,bya noose ofembroidery wool?" (200). This rhetoricalquestion, rightbeforethe ekphrasisof the shawls, alludes to the last part of the Arachneepisode in Ovid's Metamorphoses . AfterMinerva strikesArachne'shead withher shuttle,the weaver hangs herself bya noose (non tulitinfelixlaqueoque animosa ligauit / guttura,Met. 6.134-35). Thus, Rushdie sets Rani, whose nameconceivablyseemsto pun on aRANea , against thebackground ofOvid'sArachne. 5The widowofthefallen tyrant evokesthespider-woman fromOvid. The woolen noose,commonto bothArachne'sand Rani's stories,symbolizesartand punishment simultaneously. The former is not just thereason forthelatter, it also provides the material.The materialof a weaver'sart,thread,provokesthepoliticalestablishment and turnsoutto be thetool of a self-inflicted punishment. Likewise,when Ovid in his Tristiaenvisionsan epitaphengravedon his tomb,he cites hisown witas thecause ofhisdeath(ingenioperiiNaso poeta meo; Tr.3.3.74). In Shame, Rani's eighteenshawls are describedas "an epitaphof wool" (201),6 and in her last shawlsheweaves "thehardearthofherexile" (205). Rani and Arachnedo not incurpunishment just because theircreationsare provocative,but also because of their shockingrealism.Rani's shawlsrevealin luriddetailthedebaucheries , tortures, and corruption ofthedictator Iskander Harappa. Rushdie'sthorough description oftheimagesconveysthedisturbing effect ofRani'sembroidery; thenarrative forcesgraphicdepictionsof lustand torture on thereader. Perfection and accuracyare emphasizedrepeatedly. Rani's shawlsare "perfect"(200) and we are toldthatsheweaves thedisemboweledbodyand thetearin thearmpitthrough whicha man'sown hearthad beenremoved"withan accuracythatstopped the heart" (205). The heartsof the beholdersstop as theyview thetorn-outheartof thevictim: theaudiencesubjectedto therealismofRani'sartsharesthe pain of Iskander'spoliticalopponents.Similarly, thethrust of Arachne'stapestryconsistsof uncompromising realism 26 OVIDINRUSHDIE, RUSHDIEINOVID and flawlessaccuracy.?The weaver deceivesher audience intothinking thatthetransformed Jupiter is a real bull and thepowerofherskillbreakstheboundariesbetweenartistic depiction and reality.8In the end, neither Minerva, Arachne'srival,norJealousyherself can finda flawin her work(Met. 6.129-30). Arachneand Rani do notusethemagicalrealism9 oftheir embroidery just to create perfectartifacts.Instead, their graphicimages aim at shockingand shamingtheiraudiences . PatriciaJohnsonarguesconvincingly thatArachne's tapestrydepicts scenes of graphic sex.10 The gods turn themselves intoanimalsinorderto deceiveand rapevirgins, and the diction of the ekphrasis leaves no doubt that Arachnecatchesthegods inflagrante . For instance, thegirl portrays...

Feminine spaces and places in the dark recesses of Morocco's past: the prison testimonials in poetry and prose of Saïda Menebhi and Fatna El Bouih

Since the late 1990s and the end of the era known as ‘les années de plomb’ (the Lead Years), Moroccan women have spoken out in French and Arabic on a variety of issues including past socio-political and human rights abuses in Morocco. From the prison accounts authored by several former women detainees during the Lead Years to the documented revelations about Morocco's street children and ‘petites bonnes’ (girl maids often held as prisoners in the homes of the wealthy and made to work with little or no compensation), women point fingers with their pens at abuse and neglect in the past as well as in today's New Morocco. Prison literature, although overwhelmingly written by men, includes several notable testimonies by women incarcerated during the most repressive period of the Lead Years (1973–1988). These include: Femmes–Prisons: Parcours croisés (Women–prisons: traveled journeys, 2001), which is a collection of letters mothers wrote to their sons and husbands in prison, and Saïda Menebhi: poèmes, lettres, ecrits de prison (Saïda Menebhi: Poems, Letters and Writing from Prison, 2000), a compilation of prison writings by the Marxist-Leninist Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison following a hunger strike. Additionally, Hadit al-‘atama by Fatna El Bouih was translated into French as Une femme nommée Rachid (A woman named Rachid, 2002) and affirms the resistance of women even as they were tortured in prisons across Morocco. Although the government of King Mohamed VI since his coronation in 1999 has sought to improve material means and living conditions for all Moroccans, there is much that needs to be done in terms of repairing historical memory. The female voices of Moroccan poets and authors, some still living, others long gone, explore, reveal, probe and make inquiries that seek to reconcile and rectify the wounds of Morocco's dark past. Their prose and poetry establish humanity and dignity to the formerly abused that must bear witness about the past for those who are building the present.

Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

Reviewed by: Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film D. Quentin Miller (bio) Caster, Peter . Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. The ever-growing field of prison literature studies focuses attention on a number of social issues that affect the way we read American literature. Class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion are just some of the lenses that provide insight into American literature, and they fuse together into a magnifying glass when we read prison literature. When we look through this glass, we see aspects of our world invisible to the naked eye, and we also realize quickly that, when we shine a light through a magnifying glass long enough, things tend to smolder, or to burst into flames. Prison literature is both something we need to scrutinize and something that is potentially incendiary. Peter Caster's new study, Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, is aware of both of these aspects of prison literature, and is cautious to separate literary and cinematic representations of prison from actual prison experiences. Part of the reason this literature can be incendiary is related to the mysteriousness of its subject: if prisons represent sites of fear and depravity for non-incarcerated citizens, then fictional renditions of prisons can easily become sensational and, gradually, damaging to those who inhabit them, or who once inhabited them. The fact that a wildly disproportionate number of United States prisoners are black males presents a real-world problem that is reinforced by distorted representations of prisons in literature and film: as Caster says, "Those not themselves incarcerated look to [End Page 564] popular and provocative projections" of the prison experience, and "the sheer number of imprisoned black men is both a cause and a consequence of an expectation of criminality" (xii, xiii). This expectation is reinforced, in his argument, throughout the twentieth century in fiction and in film. Caster's method is clear and consistent; he incorporates "tactics of psychoanalysis with the larger strategy of historically accounting for the production and reception of these books, films, and performances" (2). This is cultural criticism done very well, drawing from psychology, history, statistical analysis, the proceedings of the American Correctional Association for over thirty years, legal studies, and foundational studies in prison literature. This pluralistic approach does not distract from Caster's careful, original readings of texts: he impressively and deftly moves between his readings and his critical methodology, producing a clear study that will prove invaluable to scholars in the field of prison literature as well as those interested in the individual texts and authors he studies. After thoroughly critiquing the relationship between imprisonment in history and in the popular imagination in his opening chapter, Caster's study contains seven chapters that progress roughly chronologically. The first three involve literary analysis; the subjects are three Faulkner novels, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. The next three chapters scrutinize wide-release films of the 1990s: American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm. A final chapter considers two live performances. This arrangement acknowledges the uniqueness of prison texts which may be rooted in a literary tradition, but which have adapted to other dramatic representations as the century has progressed. The three chapters on film are quite thorough and, taken together, impressively coherent in both their approach to black male subjects and their critique of films that blur the boundary between imagined and real imprisonment. Caster is remarkably adept at critiquing film effectively in written analysis, and while he continues to develop his context in these chapters through statistics and other source materials, he focuses in depth on the films themselves. He boldly points to a "fallacy" in these three films: "The fallacy of these prison films' redemption narratives lies in their implicit endorsement of the legal system that they suggest unjustly imprisons, but nevertheless improves, black men" (108). The relationship between history and the imagination in these films is "vexed" in his view, and his analysis of them is convincing. Although the three films were produced for different audiences, under different circumstances, with vastly different budgets, and with...

Human Rights in African Prisons (review)

Reviewed by: Human Rights in African Prisons John Daniel (bio) Jeremy Sarkin (ed) (2008) Human Rights in African Prisons. Cape Town: HSRC Press Given the current South African public's obsession with crime and its thirst for harsh punishment in the form of a re-introduction of the death penalty, there is a surprising paucity of literature on prisons in South Africa. There is of course Jonny Steinberg's The Number, the riveting account of the hegemony of the 26 and 28 gangs in Pollsmoor prison in the 1990s, while the Jali Commission Report was an equally fascinating account of the deep-seated corruption which attends the administration of the wonderfully misnamed Correctional Services Department (the post-apartheid name for the old prisons department). Julia Sloth-Nielsen's state of the prisons chapter in the 2007 State of the Nation volume is the best summary description of the prison system in South Africa known to this reader. Happily she is a contributor to this volume whose focus – its title notwithstanding – is more South Africa than Africa. Her chapter on children in African prisons is one of the most compelling in the volume. The pain of incarcerated mothers having to part from their children at age three will tug at the heartstrings of any reader, as will the knowledge that often years pass before the mothers even see their children again, let alone care for them. To criminologists, judicial figures and others, the volume is a welcome addition to the prison literature on Africa. And it has been much praised by both judges and leading legal academics. Jeremy Sarkin's perhaps slightly overlong introductory survey of the African penal system is filled with useful statistical data and enough descriptive detail to make any sane person living on this continent to resolve never to stay even one night in an African prison. Like prisons everywhere, Africa's men's prisons are massively overcrowded while its women's prisons are surprisingly underpopulated. South Africa, for example, has one of the world's highest male [End Page 123] prison populations but one of lowest when it comes to female inmates. On average, females make up only between four to five percent of the total African prison population. Why that is so is not adequately explained but probably has much to do with the reluctance of magistrates to incarcerate African women given the devastating likely consequences for their children. Certainly in South Africa most female inmates imprisoned for crimes of property (theft, shoplifting etc) have at least one suspended sentence before they were put into custodial care. Beyond Sarkin and Sloth-Nielsen's chapters, those by Schonteich on pre-trial detention and human rights in African prisons, Muntungh on alternative sentencing in Africa and Lisa Vetten stand out. The latter's breaks new ground in its focus on issues of female health and hygiene and demonstrates, for example, how vulnerable to abuse and exploitation menstruating female prisoners are in Africa. The chapter on overcrowding in African prisons by a top former prison official, EVO Dankwa, makes for sobering reading. The perspective of the volume is not all doom and gloom, however. Sarkin, for example, argues that in the last decade or so various prison reform initiatives have been undertaken across Africa and some countries, notably Tunisia and Libya, have opened their gaols to human rights organisations like Amnesty International. This has been a huge step forward but against that one must recall the fact that prisons in countries like Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe are largely deathtraps. In South Africa, a small band of non-governmental organizations strive nobly to turn local prisons into places of rehabilitation rather than the incubators of more crime. One of these is the Phoenix Zululand organisation which strives to apply the principles of restorative justice in 13 prisons in the north of KwaZulu-Natal. Beyond victim-offender mediation, Phoenix has developed into a civil rights program for prisoners, the bulk of whom are poor, largely illiterate African men and some women. Most of these should not, in Phoenix's view, be in prison. That they are is a product of their poverty (most cannot post even modest bail amounts) and...

Arabisk fængselslitteratur og den syriske digter Muhammad al-Maghut

Bo Holmberg: “Arabic Prison Literature and the Syrian Poet Muhammad al-Maghut”This article deals with some aspects of prison literature from the Middle East and mainly in Arabic. Prison literature may be literature written by prisoners either during imprisonment, or after imprisonment. It may also include literature by nonprisoners who are writing in a society where imprisonment is a constant threat for political, religious and moral reasons. Special attention is given to the situation in modern Syria, and the poetry of Muhammad al-Maghut (1934-2006) is high-lighted.

Writing in the Tower of London during the Reformation, ca. 1530–1558

This article examines the range of strategies of resistance used by figures writing in the Tower of London during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I. Ruth Ahnert analyzes acts of graffiti, marginal annotations by Edward Seymour and Lady Jane Grey, and more canonical works of prison literature by Thomas More in order to suggest that, by writing, prisoners can assert themselves, create community, re-present their imprisonment as a pious retreat, or-in the case of More-transcend the penal system by eschewing the particularity of prison production.

'Stone Walls' and ‘I’ron Bars': Richard Lovelace and the Conventions of Seventeenth-Century Prison Literature

In transcending stone walls and iron bars, Lovelace's well-known song "To Althea, From Prison" celebrates a freedom distinctly at odds with prevailing, often religiously inspired transformations of seventeenth-century carceral realities. Lovelace's celebration of "Minds innocent and quiet" fashions from traditional conventions of prison literature a political statement that redefines freedom through stoic resolve. Refusing to be bound in either song or spirit, the poem binds loyalists together in rituals of love and faith that create in the untroubled mind and the untrammeled soul a secular religion. For a moment in the 1640s, Lovelace uniquely captured the mirthful spirit of stoicism buoyed by the love, friendship, and loyalties expressed in its trinity of wine, women, and royalism.

Le sec et l'humide by Jonathan Littell

Le sec et l'humide by Jonathan Littell

Close confinement: John Thelwall and the Romantic prison

The prison was the central institutional means for silencing dissent in 1790s Britain. While attention to prisons was called for by John Howard in the 1770s, prison conditions commanded broad attention by the 1790s, when dozens of writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers lived through or were threatened with imprisonment. The 1790s saw the first systematic imprisonment of British literati, resulting in a flurry of poems, essays, broadsheets, drawings, and newspaper reports that introduced a wide range of readers to life inside a jail cell. The birth of “prison literature” is twin to the birth of British Romanticism: the prison plays an important role in the work of Thelwall, Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and of lesser‐known figures such as James Montgomery, John Augustus Bonney, and Charles Piggot. This essay examines the writing of prison poets such as Thelwall, Montgomery, and Bonney, arguing that the experience of confinement drew these writers to shape their poetry in ways that would anticipate and influence the conventions of Romantic verse. In inaugurating the formal complex that M.H. Abrams called the “greater Romantic lyric,” 1790s prison poetry is an unrecognized but important space for our understanding of the history of poetic form.

Prison's Spoilt Identities: Racially Structured Realities Within and Beyond

This article begins by seeking an explanation for the solidarity between Malay inmates and guards in perpetrating abusive and discriminatory treatment towards Malay transvestites. In the course of explaining an empirical phenomenon in the Singapore prison, this article has examined Singapore's history and ethnic demography, the ethnic Malay minority's lack of socio-economic development and modernisation vis-à-vis the ethnic Chinese majority, geo-politics, the ideology and strategic choices of the state's political elite and their implications for inter-ethnic interactions between Malays and Chinese. As this article will argue, prison culture, rather than being divorced from larger society, is in effect able to articulate and elaborate on the processes of social exclusion faced by ethnic Malay minorities and male transvestites in Singapore society. By shifting the conceptual focus from ‘prison in society’ to ‘prison of society’, a new analytical dimension of informal inmate culture and social structure has been realised; one which suggests immense possibilities for prison literature.

Prison's literature: Creative resistance to conquer power

Prison's literature: Creative resistance to conquer power

The Columbia literary history of Eastern Europe since 1945

PrefaceAcknowledgments1. World War II in the Literatures of Eastern Europe 2. Postwar Colonialism, by Communist Style 3. In the Aftermath of the Great Dictator's Death 4. Fleeing the System: Literature and Emigration 5. Internal Exile and the Literature of Escape6. Writers Behind Bars: Eastern European Prison Literature, by 1945-19907. The Reform Imperative in Eastern Europe: From Solidarity to Postmodernism8. Eastern European Women Poets of the 1980s and 1990s9. The House of Cards Collapses: The Literary Fallout of the Yugoslav Crises of the 1990s10. Glimpses of the Other World: America Through Eastern European Eyes11. The Postcolonial Literary Scene in Eastern Europe Since 1991Notes Further ReadingIndex

Can the Penitentiary Teach the Academy How to Read?

As the shadow of the colossal american prison lengthens amid the encroaching nightfall of our twenty-first-century security state, it is pierced by a brilliant though flickering illumination: the literature created by those who have endured the terrors of America's walls and cells, with their unremitting surveillance, relentless brutality, and overpowering hopelessness. When I began teaching American prison literature back in 1975, there were 360,000 people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Today there are more than 2.4 million—almost twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. During these thirty-three years, this country has constructed on average one new prison every week. Many states annually spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. More than five million Americans have been permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions. More than seven million are under the direct control of the criminal-justice system. And the experience of these millions of prisoners and ex-prisoners becomes ever more integral to American culture, not just to the culture of the devastated neighborhoods where most prisoners grew up and to which they return but also to the culture of an entire society grown accustomed to omnipresent surveillance cameras, routine body and car searches, and police patrolling the corridors of high schools.

Dissident Syria: making oppositional arts official

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what miriam cooke calls “commissioned criticism.” In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s Syria, cooke describes how intellectuals attempted to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it. A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria . She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.