Fitting Sentences : : Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives / / Jason Haslam.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Haslam, Jason,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories.While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined as "a strategic distribution of elements" that act "to exercise a power of normalization", Haslam demonstrates some of the complex connections and dissonances between these elements and the resistances to them. Each work shows how carceral practices can be used to attack a variety of identifications, be they sexual, racial, economic, or any of a variety of social categories. By analysing the works of specific prison writers but not being limited to a single locale or narrow time span, Fitting Sentences offers a significant historical and global overview of a unique genre in literature.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Opening Statements -- PART ONE: The Carceral Society -- CHAPTER ONE. 'They locked the door on my meditations': Thoreau, Society, and the Prison House of Identity -- CHAPTER TWO. 'Cast of Characters': Problems of Identity and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl -- PART TWO: Writing Wrongs -- CHAPTER THREE. 'To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law': The Paradox of the Individual in De Profundis -- CHAPTER FOUR. Positioning Discourse: Martin Luther King Jr's 'Letter from Birmingham City Jail' -- PART THREE: Prisons, Privilege, and Complicity -- CHAPTER FIVE. Being Jane Warton: Lady Constance Lytton and the Disruption of Privilege -- CHAPTER SIX. Frustrating Complicity in Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist -- Closing Statements / Opening Arguments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index