Self in the Cell

<p>Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in <em>Discipline and Punish</em> has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing detection and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. <em>The Self in the Cell</em><em>examines</em> the ways in which separate confinement prisons with their demand for autobiographical production helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.</p>