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Foreword
Largely in response to Foucault’s work on surveillance, literary and cultural historians of the early 1980s start revisiting the modern representations of “carcerality,” so much so that within years punishment as discipline gives rise to a whole discipline of punishment, imprisonment, and penal confinement. The discipline was not entirely new. Nor was it one but several rolled in one rather, and that was precisely what made it innovative, capable to take another look at an otherwise longstanding object of inquiry. In other words, the field was, and has remained, interdisciplinary. It is to this institutionally fluid, methodologically complex, and epistemologically demanding domain that Jan Alber’s Narrating the Prison belongs, lodged as it stands at the shifting crossroads of literary and film analysis, Victorian scholarship, sociology, legal studies, Frankfurt School-inspired critical theory, imagology, and narratology. I list the focus on imaginary and narrative structures last, but it certainly comes first and defines, I think, the bulk of Alber’s contribution to the study of carceral modernity in Dickens and later, twentieth-century British and American fiction and film.