Captivating Subjects

Ever since Michel Foucault?s highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison ? slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements ? has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities.This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state?s reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.

Jason Haslam is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. Julia M. Wright is a Canada Research Chair in English and Cultural Studies with the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.