Prison Writing and the Literary World

Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice

Michelle Kelly, Claire Westall, Michelle Kelly, Claire Westall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000215939
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing
and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation
and formal aesthetics, the "value" or "values" of literature,
textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical
methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing
in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and
independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development
and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting
across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise,
it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges
arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the
UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the
Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection
pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience
of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison
and the literary world.

Index

• abolition, penal 190–192
  • literary representation 193–198, 203
• aesthetics: bodily 71, 82, 215, 217, 243–244, 252–253
  • experimental 173–179, 181–186, 193–197
  • free indirect style 25, 32
  • as inflected by the material space of the prison 25, 96–106, 127–132, 248
  • realist 5, 101, 185, 240, 242–247
  • self-reflexivity 175–185, 223, 246, 252–253
  • subversive 58–59, 69–74, 132–137, 180, 197, 215, 246
  • violence 71, 82, 195, 252–253; see also genre; narrative; prison writing voice
• African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117; see also Mandela, Nelson
• Ahmad, Aziz 144–145
• Algeria: Barberousse-Serkadji Prison (see Barberousse)
  • detention during War of Independence (1954–1962) 77–83, 85
  • National Liberation Front (FLN) 77–78, 80–81, 90
  • prisons and nationalism 77–80, 87–91
  • prison writing 81–91
• Alleg, Henri: impact of writing 79, 86–90
  • La Question (The Question, 1958) 86–88
  • Prisonniers de Guerre (Prisoners of War, 1961) 79, 83–90
• anarchism: in Alison Spedding’s work (see Spedding, Alison)
  • and penal abolition 191–192
• anti-colonial politics: African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117
  • Ba‘thism 173–175, 181–183
  • Black Panther Party 126–127
  • of George Jackson (see Jackson, George)
  • Pan Africanist Congress (PA...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Wide and Worlded Vision of Prison Writing
• Problems and Silences
• PoWs and Purges
• Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making
• Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation
• From Life to Fiction
• Women, Theatre and Clean Break
• Literary Workshops
• Index