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PRAISE FOR METAPHORS OF CONFINEMENT
‘Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates
on the ethics of imprisonment, on the role of the prison in society and in the cultural
imaginary, and on the relations between law and literature from the early modern period
to the present. It is a formidable piece of scholarship, wide-ranging in the scope of its
research and innovative in its methodology; it is also passionate in its ethical and political
commitments, and subtle and learned in its readings of a rich array of fascinating texts.
Monika Fludernik’s magisterial study will make its mark as an essential point of reference
for any future discussion of prisons and prison literature.’
Professor Hal Gladfelder, University of Manchester
‘This book is the culmination of decades of work by one of the world’s top narratologists.
Fludernik takes the reader through a fascinating, enlightening, and often troubling jour-
ney through representations of literal, imagined, and metaphorical prisons in literatures in
English from the Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing eclectically from legal studies,
literary criticism, cultural and social theory, stylistics, and metaphor theory, the book
reveals the many facets of literature’s fascination with imprisonment over the centuries,
and addresses the ethical issues associated with both literary and real-world prisons. While
the book’s main contribution is to the study of metaphor, many different audiences will be
interested in it for different reasons, and all will marvel at the author’s unique combination
of towering intellect, theoretical versatility and vast scholarship. There is no doubt that this
book is destined to become a classic.’
Professor Elena Semino, Lancaster University
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Metaphors of Confinement
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LAW AND LITERATURE
The Law and Literature series publishes work that connects legal ideas to literary
and cultural history, texts, and artefacts. The series encompasses a wide range of
historical periods, literary genres, legal fields and theories, and transnational subjects,
focusing on interdisciplinary books that engage with legal and literary forms,
methods, concepts, dispositions, and media. It seeks innovative studies of every kind,
including but not limited to work that examines race, ethnicity, gender, national
identity, criminal and civil law, legal institutions and actors, digital media,
intellectual property, economic markets, and corporate power, while also
foregrounding current interpretive methods in the humanities, using these
methods as dynamic tools that are themselves subject to scrutiny.
Series Editors
Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa
Simon Stern, University of Toronto
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Metaphors of
Confinement
The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
1
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1
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© Monika Fludernik 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931802
ISBN 978–0–19–884090–9
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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To my mother, Ingeborg Böhm, with gratitude and in memory
of her love and support
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Preface
This is a book about carceral metaphors and the carceral in fact and fiction. The
prisons I deal with are mainly literary and imaginary ones, but also always ‘real’,
whether the texts deal with penal institutions or metaphorical prisons that affect
their protagonists’ minds. One of the prime theses of this book is that a distinc-
tion between the real (historical and contemporary sites of incarceration and dis-
courses about imprisonment) and the imaginary (representations of these in
literature and the arts as well as metaphorical references to prisons) fails to
explain the omnipresence of the carceral in literature but also in the world.
Prisons are (perceived to be) everywhere, in language, in texts, in images, in our
minds. Our carceral imaginary operates not merely inside jails but also outside
cor rection al institutions in our everyday world. We are concerned with prisons
not only when we engage in the politics of security and punishment, moulding
penal confinement through legislation and the implementation of these laws; our
experience of and fantasies about con finement also pervade social and societal
arenas that have no immediate connection with crime, punishment, the police or
the law. Politically, too, the past decade has pushed the issue of imprisonment to
the front of the news, whether in relation to the USA’s un par alleled rise of the
prison population (currently at over 2.3 million (Tonry 2016)), the in cid ences of
torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, or the finan-
cial costs of full-scale incarceration. More generally, Western culture is steeped in
images of imprisonment, and this fact shapes my essential questions. What are
the function and uses of carcerality in our societies? What are its ideological
rewards and its psychological compensations?
More specifically, this book deals with a wide variety of recurrent topoi and
images that permeate literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present. These
include, among others, tropes such as the world as prison and prison as world topoi,
the metaphor of the prison-like home or of the prison as refuge and hermitage, of
the body as prison, and of the prison amoureuse, the prison of love. This inventory,
which comprises many more culturally fossilized figurations of the carceral, dis-
plays a great variety of textual manifestations. Historically, these were able to adapt
to political and institutional developments such as the invention of the penitentiary
in the late eighteenth century. The dialectic of familiar tropes and changing condi-
tions of application constitutes another important facet of the present study. The
present book is the first comprehensive study of carceral imagery. Despite some
initial work on the container metaphor by Mark Johnson (1987), neither linguistic
metaphor theory nor literary criticism have so far systematically focused on the
pervasive prison metaphors in literary and non-literary texts.
