CRITICISM

Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “The Thing He Loves: Murder as Aesthetic Experience in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 3 (1987): 349-66.

Evaluates Wilde's poem as it relates to the rest of his work; suggesting that Wilde underestimates the brutality of the murder he describes as he shifts between symbolism and realism.

Bagby, Lewis. “Dostoyevsky's ‘Notes from a Dead House’: the Poetics of the Introductory Paragraph.” Modern Language Review 81 (1986): 139-52.

Discusses how the novel's introduction mediates between fiction and experience and traces its themes of grace and redemption.

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 337 p.

Suggests that concepts of the individual and authority used by authors in depicting the modern prison were first developed in eighteenth-century literature.

Berthold, Michael C. “The Prison World of Melville's Pierre and ‘Bartleby.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33, no. 4 (1987): 237-42.

Interprets Melville's prison stories as models for the operation of power in America and argues that Melville also finds prisons in the home and school.

Bumas, E. “Fictions of the Panopticon: Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” American Literature 73, no. 1 (2001): 121-45.

Applies the insights of Foucault on Bentham's Panopticon to Hawthorne's American novels.

Crawford, Iain. “‘Shades of the Prison-House’: Religious Romanticism in Oliver Twist.” Dickens Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1987): 78-90.

Proposes that Dickens's depiction of life as a prison with imagination and immortality as the means for escape is drawn from Romantic influences, particularly Wordsworth's Immortality Ode.

DuPuy, Harry. “American Prisons and A Tale of Two Cities.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 25 (1987): 39-48.

Compares Dickens's notes from his tour of American prisons to sections of A Tale of Two Cities, particularly the descriptions of prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 333 p.

Theorizes that the development of modern prisons and theories of punishment are part of the broader figuration of power in Western society, placing special emphasis on Bentham's proposed prison called the Panopticon.

Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. “‘The Games of the Prison Children’ in Dickens's Little Dorrit.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20, no. 2 (1997): 187-213.

Analyzes the theme of play in one of Dickens's prison novels and how it connects with the author's narrative strategy.

Newlyn, Lucy. “‘In City Pent’: Echo and Allusion in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb.” Review of English Studies 32, no. 128 (1981): 408-28.

Examines the contradictions and variances in Romantic attitudes toward solitude and self-imprisonment.

Priestley, Philip, ed. Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography. London: Methuen, 1985, 311 p.

Compiles several prison memoirs and biographies to give an account of life in a Victorian prison, from the physical surroundings to corporal punishment to life upon release.

Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean. The Prison of Womanhood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987, 169 p.

Examines the fictional characters of Isabel Archer, Emma Woodhouse, Emma Bovary, and Dorothea Brooke to demonstrate the constrictions confronting strong, creative women in nineteenth-century society.

Senf, Carol. “Jane Eyre: The Prison-House of Victorian Marriage.” Journal of Women's Studies in Literature 1 (1979): 353-59.

Explores the theme of domestic “incarceration” in Charlotte Brontë's novel.

Ward, Aileen. “Romantic Castles and Real Prisons; Wordsworth, Blake, and Revolution.” Wordsworth Circle 30, no. 1 (1999): 3-15.

Discusses the effects of the French Revolution on the poetry of English Romantic authors, with special attention given to the imagery of the besieged fortress and liberated prisoners.