Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

ISBN-13: 9781403934444 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 234 str.

Professor Dana Rabin

Opis

With their reputations or lives at stake, ordinary men and women in the Eighteenth Century presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. To account for their criminal behaviour and to excuse it, they claimed a space between the coherent self and the insane self: the 'displaced' self. This language had complicated implications within the context of sensibility and the concern with the self that was so distinguishing a characteristic of the Eighteenth Century. English legal culture struggled not only to contain and to direct the 'ungovernable passions' but also to define the integrated, controlled, and controllable self: what scholars would later call the modern subject. The insights about self and subjectivity generated by this study contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the individual and the state and look toward the impact of these developments on the formation of Britain as a nation. By combining social, cultural, and legal history this study reveals the subtleties of the relationship between emotion, responsibility, gender, class and citizenship in the Eighteenth Century and their concrete implications for real people.

Recenzje

- '[Rabin] give[s] weight to abstractions like 'sensibility' as actual forces in the courtroom and in the reform movement.'

Paul Baines, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.42, no.1, 2008

Spis treści

Crime, Culture, and the Self 'Of Persons Capable of Committing Crimes': Pleas of Mental Distress in the Eighteenth-Century Courtroom Old Excuses, New Meanings: "Temporary Frenzy," Necessity, Passion, and Compulsion Bodies of Evidence, States of Mind: Infanticide, Emotion, and Sensibility 'An indulgence given to great crimes'? Sensibility, Compassion, and Law Reform The End of Excuse? James Hadfield and the Insanity Plea From Self to Subject Bibliography

O autorze

DANA RABIN is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the history of early modern Britain with an emphasis on law, gender, emotion, and identity and is the author of "Searching for the Self in Eighteenth-Century English Criminal Trials, 1730-1800".