Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century

Tracking the evolutionary arc of prison writing across the twentieth century in an international and comparative framework, this study proposes an integrated account of the major shifts and movements in this relatively neglected genre of autobiography. Dwelling on works—memoirs, novellas, poems—by actual detainees, the book offers a close stylistic analysis of 12 important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinizing modes of an earlier tradition, to es