Prison and the Architecture of Mind: Images in 18th Century Literature and Art

FAIN: FT-13685-78

John B. Bender
Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)

To write a book about social boundaries and images of captivity in the 18th century, and about the period's notions of escape and reform as embodied in its literature and art. The book will concern chiefly the similarities and differences between prisons in historical fact and prisons as depicted in literature and art — subject not treated before. In the early decades of the century, when Defoe, Oglethorpe, Hogarth and Gay treated the subject of prisons in England, such institutions were domestic — both organizationally and architecturally, the jailer was like the lord of a manor, collecting rents, and the buildings specially constructed as prisons resembled grand houses in plan and appearance. Prison reform changed all this and the image became one of