Anne Schwan

Sensitive interdisciplinary reading of texts concerning female prison experience in nineteenth-century England; fascinating study of the voices of nineteenth-century female offenders.

Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-century England

Convict Voices

In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints.

Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England

Tara Thomson

This handbook brings together recent international scholarship and developments in the interdisciplinary fields of digital and public humanities. Exploring key concepts, theories, practices and debates within both the digital and public humanities, the handbook also assesses how these two areas are increasingly intertwined. Key questions of access, ownership, authorship and representation link the individual sections and contributions. The handbook includes perspectives from the Global South and presents scholarship and practice that engage with a multiplicity of underrepresented ‘publics’, including LGBTQ+ communities, ethnic and linguistic minorities, the incarcerated and those affected by personal or collective trauma.

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities

Stephen Shapiro

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series. Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish takes a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.

Anne Schwan

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