Fitting Sentences – Identity in Nineteenth– and Twentieth–Century Prison Narrat…

Fitting SentencesIdentity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives\nAuthor(s): Jason Haslam\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Toronto Press, Canada\nImprint: University of Toronto Press\nISBN-13: 9780802038333, 978-0802038333\nSynopsis\nFitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories.\n\n While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined as a strategic distribution of el.