Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century
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A01=Julian Murphet
Author_Julian Murphet
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
class and writing
comparative literary study
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ezra Pound
history of autobiography
Nawal el-Saadawi
Ng?g? wa Thiong'o
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Oscar Wilde
politics and literature
Primo Levi
Prison writing
race and literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781399513975
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Tracking the evolutionary arc of prison writing across the twentieth century in an international and comparative framework, this study proposes an integrated account of the major shifts and movements in this relatively neglected genre of autobiography. Dwelling on works memoirs, novellas, poems by actual detainees, the book offers a close stylistic analysis of 12 important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinizing modes of an earlier tradition, to espouse openly political sentiments and solidarities. Looking at works by Oscar Wilde, Rosa Luxemburg, Ezra Pound, Primo Levi, Bobby Sands, Angela Davis, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, and Behrouz Boochani (among others), the book shows how themes such as the annihilation of experience, dehumanization, sensory deprivation, brutality, and numbing routine are woven into distinctive textual artefacts that give evidence of an abiding human resilience in the face of raw state power.
Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
