I

This book is offered as a contribution to the literary scholarship of texts written by political prisoners – of one description or another – in the ‘long’ twentieth century, stretching from Oscar Wilde's two-year sentence to hard labour in the 1890s to Behrouz Boochani's seven-year detention on Manus Island more recently. It is neither criminological nor sociological in its orientation; rather, it proposes a specifically literary investigation into the properties and varieties of a particular subgenre of life-writing (sometimes in a lightly fictionalised mode) concerning the imprisonment of men and women for broadly political reasons. Although its method is principally to dwell, critically and intimately, with the individual texts themselves, looking to details of style, voice, mood and tone for information about many of the most pressing political and aesthetic qualities of modern prison writing, there is also a larger argument at play as regards the historical transformations of the carceral institution itself, in several national contexts, as the century matured. In this introduction, I will first justify my methodology and the nature of my investigations; then outline the main lineaments of this larger argument, as it weaves its arterial way through the chapters that follow.

As far as the approach taken by this study is concerned, while it shares the abiding concern of most critics engaged in this field – the sense that, as H. Bruce Franklin aptly puts it, ‘Writers scribbling away in their cells or in limited prison libraries tell us most of what we know about these dark fortresses of gloom and terror. They disclose the nasty, brutish details of the life within’ – it also departs from this overwhelmingly epistemological attitude by insisting that the style and voice of prison texts do rather more than ‘disclose’ the institutions they inscribe. Indeed, what I will want to show is that details of tone and mood, imagery and rhetoric not only add to our pool of information about the ‘obscene’ space of prison life; they create a veritable force-field of literary energy that holds that space at arms’ length, allowing for new and untold imaginative capacities to flood the carceral gloom and thence enter into our world.