England in Prison Tropes: Carceral Narratives in English Novels of the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Based on the theories of prison reforms and prison metaphors, I examine the fictional representations of prison-like nations in English novels of the long eighteenth century, referring to various works of this time but using four novels as major examples: Daniel Defoe’s *Moll Flanders* (1722), Samuel Richardson’s *Pamela* (1740), Charlotte Lennox’s *The Female Quixote* (1752) and Jane Austen’s *Pride and Prejudice* (1813). By examining how prisons or prison-like spaces are figuratively represented in the selected novels, how the English nation is represented through carceral tropes and how different narrative strategies resonate with the spaces of prison-like nations, I explore the repeated encounters between carceral, national and narrative forms. Just as various prison-related concepts, from the womb to the cage, shed light on the power structures of the English nation from capricious absolute authority to mutual disciplinary supervision, different novelistic strategies, from autobiographical to epistolary narration, blend with prison-nation tropes to construct a highly dynamic figurative network of carceral England.