Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.

Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities.

This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.

By Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright

Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright, Introduction

The Subject of Captivity

1. Jason Haslam, 'Being Jane Warton: Lady Constance Lytton and the Disruption of Privilege'
2. John Mackay, 'Form and Authority in Russian Serf Autobiography'
3. Tess Chakkalakal, 'I, hereby, vow to Read Equiano's Interesting Narrative'

Captivating Discourses: Class and Nation

4. Frank Lauterbach, 'From the slums to the slums: The Delimitation of Social Identity in Late Victorian Prison narratives.'
5. Monika Fludernik, 'Stone Walls do (Not) a Prison Make: Fact and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Non-Literary Representations of Imprisonment"
6. Julia M. Wright, 'National Feeling and the Colonial Prison: Teeling's Personal Narrative'

Captivating Otherness

7. Jennifer Costello Brezina, 'A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity
8. Christine Marlin, 'A Prison Officer and a Gentleman: The Prison Inspector as Imperialist Hero in the Writings of Major Arthur Griffiths (1838-1908)'