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Literature Of Prison Literature

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Prison literature, epitomized as a thriving literary genre, is identified as literature which is penned while the author is unwillingly kept in a location, such as a penitentiary, jail, detention center, correctional facility, house arrest or in solitary confinement. The literature produced by writers during or after their incarceration can be about prison as place of Romantic solitude and the prison as brutal, inhuman institution. This can be illustrated in a number of forms including epistle, autobiography, memoir, journal/diary, novel, poetry, manifesto, essay and political philosophy which made writers create hundreds of literary works that have encompassed a wide range of literature known as prison literature. Surveying prison …show more content…

The Victorians also had clear pictures about what prisons should be like. Unpleasant places, brutal, inhuman institution accompanied by harsh punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) to dissuade people from committing crimes or breaking the law signify the strict social code of conduct in the system of judiciary. Once inside, prisoners had to be made to face up to their own felonies or crimes, by keeping them in silence and making them work hard. Walking a treadwheel (treadmill) and picking oakum (separating strands of rope) were the most common forms of hard labour.
Toward the mid-nineteenth century, however, some authors became interested in having the actual conditions of prisons portrayed in their works. Although eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) (whose protagonist is born and imprisoned in Newgate Prison), and John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera (1728), William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794) had described the image of the infamous Newgate Prison in their writings, Charles Dickens's descriptions of the criminal world and the prison took a somewhat darker tone which appeared in a number of novels including Oliver Twist (1838), Little Dorrit (1857) and Great Expectations (1861). Writings from prison also gained more visibility as more individuals who possessed the skill to write, were incarcerated. Prison biography became a genre in itself, allowing

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