Narrating Transgression

Crime and the criminal are amongst the outstanding discourses of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English written culture, a subject to be found in ballads, sermons, biographies, case histories, dying speeches, newspaper articles, accounts of trials, Newgate Ordinary reports, paintings and etchings, poems, comedies and novels. It is this printed material that the essays in the present collection approach, somewhat obliquely, searching for hidden meanings and unavowed aims. The result is an opening up of new perspectives: not only on the various attitudes towards particular crimes and particular types of criminal - such as thieves, 'sodomites' and prostitutes - but also on cultural control as enacted by the various literary and visual genres. New insights are achieved into seventeenth and eighteenth-century mentalities, into perception of the marginal, and into the very idea of the human being.