Prison Writing: Liberty and Language

The relationship between intellectual freedom and literature is never so pronounced as it is in prison, where many writers have spent time reflecting on their experience and committing it to the page, and where many political prisoners have turned to the pen to continue their struggles from inside. In a world where internment and refugee camps, detention centres, and prisons have never been so common, where to be incarcerated is to be part of a world-wide community of the displaced, the persecuted, and the neglected, it pays to review the history of writing from detention. Pursuing a course from the 17th century through to today, in a number of national contexts, this course will reveal patterns of continuity and disruption as the reasons for imprisonment change, while the basic punishment stays the same. Along the way, we will discover literary strategies of critique, escapism, melancholy, and hope, and a tradition of radical thinking hatched within the grim machinery of sequestration and solitude.