Overview

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, the book offers a close stylistic analysis of 12 important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinizing 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, Ngg wa Thiong'o, and Behrouz Boochani (among others), the book shows how themes such as the annihilation of experience, dehumanization, 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Julian Murphet (Jury Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Adelaide)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399513975

ISBN 10:   1399513974
Pages:   232
Publication Date:   01 August 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Symphony of Sorrow: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis 2. Defamiliarizing the Dungeon: Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist 3. In Immense World of Delight: Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Writing 4. Uncle Ez Do the Polis in Different Voices: The Pisan Cantos as Prison Writing 5. Seeing the Gorgon: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man 6. The Gulag Work Ethic: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 7. Decorous Perceptions at the Cracking Point: Ruth First’s 117 Days 8. House Style: Black Prison Writing of the 1970s 9. Living Hell: Bobby Sands’ Prison Writing 10. ‘Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper!’: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at Kamĩtĩ 11. Antigone Evolved: Nawal el-Saadawi’s Memoirs of the Women’s Prison 12. So Much Malice: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains Bibliography Index

Reviews

One constant remains with prisons: the influential role of writers who expose these systems. This underscores the enduring power of literature. -- Behrouz Boochani, author of No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison This book is one of those all-too-rare works of criticism that demonstrates how literary writing has so much to teach us about the world we have been forced to inhabit. Here the prison is conjured forth in the language of collective outrage and emancipatory longing, in a global narrative that reaches from Oscar Wilde to Behrouz Boochani, and in a mode of writing that seizes heart and mind with the granularity of inscription and in the cadences of its sound. -- Mark Steven, University of Exeter

One constant remains with prisons: the influential role of writers who expose these systems. This underscores the enduring power of literature. --Behrouz Boochani, author of No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison This book is one of those all-too-rare works of criticism that demonstrates how literary writing has so much to teach us about the world we have been forced to inhabit. Here the prison is conjured forth in the language of collective outrage and emancipatory longing, in a global narrative that reaches from Oscar Wilde to Behrouz Boochani, and in a mode of writing that seizes heart and mind with the granularity of inscription and in the cadences of its sound. --Mark Steven, University of Exeter

Author Information

Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

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