Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century

[headline]Provides a comprehensive survey of twentieth-century prison writing from around the world Tracking the evolutionary arc of prison writing across the twentieth century in an international and comparative framework, this study proposes an integrated account of the major shifts and movements in this relatively neglected genre of autobiography. Dwelling on works - memoirs, novellas, poems - by actual detainees, Julian Murphet offers a close stylistic analysis of twelve important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinising modes of an earlier tradition, to espouse openly political sentiments and solidarities. Looking at works by Oscar Wilde, Rosa Luxemburg, Ezra Pound, Primo Levi, Bobby Sands, Angela Davis, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Behrouz Boochani, among others, the book shows how themes such as the annihilation of experience, dehumanisation, sensory deprivation, brutality and numbing routine are woven into distinctive textual artefacts that give evidence of an abiding human resilience in the face of raw state power. [bio]Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), Multimedia Modernism (2009), Faulkner's Media Romance (2017), Todd Solondz (2019) and Modern Character: 1888-1905 (2023).