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Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 (Critical Issues in Crime and Society) by Jodi Schorb is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 (Critical Issues in Crime and Society) about?

Shining new light on early American prison literature—from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature— Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century. Looking first at colonial America—an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy—Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial “literacy events” that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century’s end, narratives by condemned criminals helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy. Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of the first penitentiaries—such as Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and New York’s Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unve

Who reads Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 (Critical Issues in Crime and Society)?

Author

Jodi Schorb

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9780813562674

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Science, Social Science