In this Book
- Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment
- Book
- 1996
- Published by: NYU Press
An ex-convict struggles with his addictive yearning for prison. A law-abiding citizen broods over his pleasure in violent, illegal acts. A prison warden loses his job because he is so successful in rehabilitating criminals. These are but a few of the intriguing stories Martha Grace Duncan examines in her bold, interdisciplinary book Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.
Duncan writes: "This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns - about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds." She portrays upright citizens who harbor a strange liking for criminal deeds, and criminals who conceive of prison in positive terms: as a nurturing mother, an academy, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, or a refuge from life's trivia. In developing her unique vision, Duncan draws on literature, history, psychoanalysis, and law. Her work reveals a nonutopian world in which criminals and non-criminals--while injuring each other in obvious ways--nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising fashion.
Table of Contents
- Title Page
- p. iii
- Copyright Page
- pp. iv-vi
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-6
- PART ONE Cradled on the Sea: Positive Images of Prison and Theories of Punishment
- CHAPTER 5 Methodological Issues
- pp. 44-47
- Epilogue to Part One
- p. 56
- PART TWO A Strange Liking: Our Admiration for Criminals
- Prologue to Part Two
- pp. 59-63
- PART THREE In Slime and Darkness: The Metaphor of Filth in Criminal Justice
- Prologue to Part Three
- pp. 121-122
- Bibliography
- pp. 243-262