Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cellexamines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.

The Self in the Cell examines the emergence of the separate confinement penitentiary in England, the demand for autobiography the penitentiary imposed and the ways in which the prison's demand for self-narrative shaped Victorian novels about the private self. It is shown, contrary to what is argued by Foucauldians that the prison is more closely and tangibly related to the first-person narrative production than to omnisciently-narrated 'fantasies of surveillance'.