Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century

Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction 1. The Symphony of Sorrow: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis2. Defamiliarizing the Dungeon: Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist 3. In Immense World of Delight: Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Writing4. Uncle Ez Do the Polis in Different Voices: The Pisan Cantos as Prison Writing5. Seeing the Gorgon: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man6. The Gulag Work Ethic: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich7. Decorous Perceptions at the Cracking Point: Ruth First’s 117 Days8. House Style: Black Prison Writing of the 1970s9. Living Hell: Bobby Sands’ Prison Writing10. ‘Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper!’: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at Kamĩtĩ11. Antigone Evolved: Nawal el-Saadawi’s Memoirs of the Women’s Prison12. So Much Malice: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the MountainsBibliographyIndex

One constant remains with prisons: the influential role of writers who expose these systems. This underscores the enduring power of literature.