The Self in the Cell : Narrating the Victorian Prisoner

The Self in the Cell examines the emergence of the separate confinement penitentiary in England, the demand for autobiography the penitentiary imposed and the ways in which the prison's demand for self-narrative shaped Victorian novels about the private self.

It is shown, contrary to what is argued by Foucauldians that the prison is more closely and tangibly related to the first-person narrative production than to omnisciently-narrated 'fantasies of surveillance'.