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Reading Prisoners - Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,017
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Reading Prisoners - Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845 (Hardcover)
Series: Critical Issues in Crime and Society
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Shining new light on early American prison literature--from its
origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to
its later works of autobiography, expose, and imaginative
literature--"Reading Prisoners" weaves together insights about the
rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early
American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime
writing in the "long" eighteenth century.
Looking first at colonial America--an era often said to devalue
jailhouse literacy--Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era
launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal
confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were
crucial "literacy events" that sparked widespread public
fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent
with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great
Awakening. By century's end, narratives by condemned criminals
helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises
of expanded literacy.
Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of
the first penitentiaries--such as Philadelphia's Walnut Street
Prison and New York's Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils
the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner
education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply
prisoners with books and education. Indeed, a new philosophy
emerged, one that argued that prisoners were best served by silence
and hard labor, not by reading and writing--a stance that a new
generation of convict authors vociferously protested.
The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the
1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again
to the fore. "Reading Prisoners" offers vital background to the
ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.
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