Captivating Subjects
Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2020
- Category
- General
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802089687
- Publish Date
- Aug 2005
- List Price
- $88.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781487526146
- Publish Date
- Feb 2020
- List Price
- $31.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442672734
- Publish Date
- Jul 2005
- List Price
- $86.00
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Description
Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.
Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities.
This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.
About the authors
Jason Haslam is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Julia M. Wright is a Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University.
