The Self in the Cell Narrating the Victorian Prisoner

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 Cell examines 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.

Introduction Solitude, Surveillance, and the Art of the Novel; Chapter 1 Narrating the Victorian Prisoner; Chapter 2 Prisoners by Boz: Pickwick Papers and American Notes; Chapter 3 Charles Reade, the Facts, and Deliberate Fictions; Chapter 4 “How Not to Do It”: Dickens, the Prison, and the Failure of Omniscience; Chapter 5 The “Marks System”: Australia and Narrative Wounding; Chapter 6 The Self in the Cell: Villette, Armadale, and Victorian Self-Narration; conclusion Narrative Power and Private Truth: Freud, Foucault, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood;

Sean Grass