Prison literature
Prison literature is a literary genre characterized by literature that is written while the author is confined in a location against his or her will, such as a prison, jail or house arrest.[1] The writing can be about prison, informed by it, or simply coincidentally written while in prison. It could be a memoir, nonfiction, or fiction.
Notable examples of prison literature
Marco Polo found time to dictate a detailed account of his travels to China, The Travels of Marco Polo, to a fellow inmate whilst he was imprisoned in Genoa from 1298 to 1299.[1] Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy in exile, far away from his beloved home town of Florence, which he was not allowed to enter again after 1301. Sir Thomas Malory likely wrote Le Morte d'Arthur while being an imprisoned knight as described by himself.
Miguel de Cervantes was held captive by Barbary pirates as a galley slave in Algiers between 1575 and 1580, and from this experience he drew inspiration for his novel Don Quixote.
Raimondo Montecuccoli wrote his aphorisms on the art of war in a Stettin prison (c. 1639–1641).[6] John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) while in jail.
Fernand Braudel wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II whilst being held at a POW camp near Lübeck, Germany, until the end of WWII.
In 1942 Jean Genet wrote his first novel Our Lady of the Flowers while in prison near Paris, scrawled on scraps of paper.[1][7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Letters and Papers from Prison whilst at Tegel Prison in 1943. Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed while in prison, and wrote Sozaboy, about a young naïve imprisoned soldier.
Iranian author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did some of his writing while imprisoned by the Soviet Union. He won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Letter from Birmingham Jail is an open letter by Martin Luther King Jr. written in 1963 from City Jail, Birmingham, Alabama. Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays by Eldridge Cleaver, written in Folsom State Prison in 1965. Behrouz Boochani authored No Friend But the Mountains (2018) by using a mobile phone to send thousands of text messages during his incarceration by the Australian government on Manus Island.
A number of postcolonial texts are based on the author's experiences in prison. Nigerian author Chris Abani’s book of poetry Kalakuta Republic is based on his experiences in prison. Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote the Buru Quartet while in prison in Indonesia. Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's prison diary titled Detained: A Prisoner's Diary was published in 1981. Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (1994) is about his 28-years of prison, from which he was released in 1990.
Some examples of female prison writers include
American prison literature
20th-century America brought about many pieces of prison literature. Some examples of such pieces are My Life in Prison by
Prison literature written in America is of particular interest to some scholars who point out that pieces which reveal the brutality of life behind bars pose an interesting question about American society: "Can these things really happen in prosperous, freedom-loving America?"[12] Since America is globally reputed as being a “democratic haven” and the “land of freedom,” writings that come out of American prisons can potentially present a challenge to popularly-held mythologized impressions about the country's founding principles. Jack London, a famous American writer who was incarcerated for 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary, is an example of such a challenger; in his memoir "Pinched": A Prison Experience he recalls how he was automatically sentenced to 30 days in prison with no chance to defend himself or even plead innocent or guilty. While sitting in the courtroom he thought to himself, "Behind me were the many generations of my American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine fought and died for was the right of trial by jury. This was my heritage, stained sacred by their blood…" London's "sacred heritage" made no difference, however. It is stories such as London's that make American prison literature a common and popular subtopic of the broader genre of literature.
For readers of American prison memoirs, it means getting a glimpse into a world they would never otherwise experience. As Tom Wicker puts it, "They disclose the nasty, brutish details of the life within – a life the authorities would rather we not know about, a life so far from conventional existence that the accounts of those who experience it exert the fascination of the unknown, sometimes the unbelievable.” He also notes that “what happens inside the walls inevitably reflects the society outside." So not only do readers acquire a sense of the world inside the walls, gaining insight into the thoughts and feelings of prisoners; they also gain a clearer vision of the society which exists outside the prison walls and how it treats and affects those whom they place within. D. Quentin Miller described prison literature as a "fascinating glimmer of humanity persisting in circumstances that conspire, with overwhelming force, to obliterate it."[13]
See also
External links
References
- ^ New York Times Book Review, July 24, 2011.
- ^ Catholic Encyclopedia [1]. The quote is commonly seen in a number of sources, but without attribution; the Catholic Encyclopedia entry is the oldest "known" citation.
- TheGuardian.com. 25 December 2017.
- Isaac Disraeli. "Imprisonment of the Learned". Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1. Frederick Warne & Co. pp. 35–38.
- ^ Refers to Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (Denuo Emendatius Editae) ("Annotations on the New Testament") (1641–50), Volume 2, Matthew 14-28
- ^ "My unrelenting vice", Bora Cosic, 5 September 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f Emily Temple. "In Black and White: 10 Famed Literary Jailbirds", Flavorwire, January 15, 2012.
- ^ Interview with Mahmoud Dowlatabadi. Vimeo.
- ^ Overy, Richard (21 September 1995). "Didn't he do well?". London Review of Books. 17 (18).
- ^ Judith A. Scheffler (ed.), "Caesarina Kona Makhoere (1955–)", in Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings, 200 to the Present, Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002, p. 97.
- ^ "Caesarina Kona Makhoere", South African History Online, August 20, 2011.
- ^ H. Bruce Franklin (ed.), Prison Writing in 20th Century America (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998).
- ISBN 0786421460.