Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing
and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation
and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature,
textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical
methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing
in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and
independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development
and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting
across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise,
it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges
arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the
UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the
Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection
pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience
of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison
and the literary world.