Abstract:

This dissertation examines experimentation and innovation in genres of the eighteenth-century literature provoked by criminal punishments based on forced labor. As recent histories of the penal systems of Britain and the early United States have shown, penal servitude--in the form of transportation to the colonies or confinement at hard labor in regional prisons--displaced merely injurious or lethal corporal punishments in this period. This shift not only supplied much needed labor for imperial expansion and fed reform ideologies but it also placed a premium on convict lives as a form of evidence that could verify the successes and failures of law's intervention in social and property relations. As a response to this attention and interest in criminal lives, dominant literary forms of this period were expanded, reconfigured, and layered with thematic and formal references to penal processes. What we now recognize as the novel emerged, in part, from the stretching of criminal and spiritual biography to accommodate lives that extended well beyond the gallows. Lyric poetry and autobiography were likewise refashioned in such a way as to explore the consciousness of convicts whose punishment was intended to chart a new trajectory in life towards rehabilitation. Exploring the relationship between law and cultural forms, this study tallies the responsiveness of literary writing to a turn to labor as punishment; in so doing it proposes avenues for historiographic inquiry into the way such punishments were incorporated into a colonial plan, defined against slavery, situated within Christian beliefs, and--most importantly--a catalyst for generic innovations that reprocessed law's mechanisms for reading audiences. Opening with an introduction that discusses works of colonial imagination by Aphra Behn and John Gay, the study proceeds through chapters on Daniel Defoe, Robert Southey and William Lisle Bowles, and Stephen Burroughs.