“A valuable contribution to ongoing scholarly discussions of the relationship between formal narrative devices and ideology … this is a highly readable, very compelling study of the cultural and political underpinnings of narrative form.” – Style

“While Dickens and other realists fancied society itself as one big prison and the latter as a microcosm of the former, a significant number of authors and movie directors closer to our time appear to buy into the notion of prison as ‘social necessity’ and violent arena that retroactively legitimates our apprehensions and further shores up ‘consensus’ around the dominant correctional mindset. For sure, these are all controversial problems of urgent interest inside and outside the academy. Narrating the Prison deals with them systematically, without preconceptions. Thoroughly researched, the book sheds refreshing light on prison literature and film.” – Professor Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

"Almost formalistic in its exhaustive analysis...Alber carefully examines the experience of imprisonment as these narratives present it to those who have not been incarcerated. Recommended." - CHOICE

Jan Alber is an assistant professor in the English Department of the University of Freiburg in Germany. He received a scholarship from the German Research Foundation that allowed him to spend the 2007–2008 academic year at Ohio State University as a visiting scholar doing research on his second book under the auspices of Project Narrative. Alber's new project focuses on unnatural elements in postmodernist narratives. He wrote articles on Beckett, Dickens, narratology, the prison experience, ideological underpinnings of prison narratives, cinematic prison metaphors, and impossible storyworlds that were published or are forthcoming in journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style. He edited two volumes, Moderne – Postmoderne (with Monika Fludernik, 2003) and Stones of Law - Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age (with Frank Lauterbach, forthcoming at the University of Toronto Press). Jan Alber also contributed to numerous edited collections as well as to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and the new Handbook of Narratology.

Foreword

Acknowledgments and Typographical Conventions

Chapter I: Introduction

Chapter II: What is a Prison?

The 'Old' and the 'New' Prison System in Great Britain

The 'Birth' of the Penitentiary in the United States

The Experience of Imprisonment

Chapter III: The Dark Dungeons in Charles Dickens's Novels and their Film Adaptations

The Prison as All-Embracing Shadow in Little Dorrit

- Prisons, Inmates, and the Prison Experience

- The Prison as World and Forms of Metaphorical Imprisonment

- The Prison and the Novel's Narrative Structure

"I Hope You Care to Be Recalled to Life?": Incarceration in A Tale of Two Cities

- The Imprisonment of Dr. Manette

- Charles Darnay's Time in Prison

- The Rulers Who Run the Prisons

The Internalization of the Prison in Great Expectations

- Pip's Guilt Complex in the Novel

- The Prison and Interiority in the Film

- Two Views on Mental Confinement

Chapter IV: Legitimating the Prison – Reproducing Cultural Hegemonies: Prison Narratives of the Twentieth Century

Critical Counter-Discourse or Pro-Prison Propaganda?

Narrating Prisoners and Prison Settings in Novels and Films

- The Prison Population in Fictional Prison Narratives

- Prison Settings in Novels and Films

- The Representation of Minds and Bodies in "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" and its Film Version

- Inmate Interiority in "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"

The Prison as a Testing Ground for Masculinity: The Process of Becoming an Insider

The Monotonous Routine Cycle of Traditional Disciplinary Prisons

Prison Violence and 'Homosexual' Rape as Forms of Symbolic 'Feminization'

The Prisoner as 'Abject' – The Madness of the 'Hole'

The Guards or the 'Other' Prisoners

Chapter V: Prison Metaphors in Novels and Films of the Twentieth Century

'Positive' and 'Negative' Metaphors of Imprisonment

- The Prison as Womb, Tomb, and Homosocial Club

- Forms of Rehabilitation and Positive Prison Images

- Disciplinary Prisons as Cages for Wild Animals

- The Prison as Hell

The Prison as World – The World as Prison

- Conformism and Individualism in Prison

- The Class System in Prison versus Class as a Prison

- Racial Oppression in Prison versus Society as Prison

- Is the Whole World a Boring Prison?

Chapter VI: Conclusion

Bibliography

Index