Vagrant figures : law, literature, and the origins of the police / Sal Nicolazzo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nicolazzo, Sal, author.

Series:

Lewis Walpole series in eighteenth-century culture and history.

Yale scholarship online.

The Lewis Walpole series in eighteenth-century culture and history

Yale scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Police--History.

Police.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.) : 3 b-w illus.

Place of Publication:

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Sal Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Police Archives Before the Police

Chapter One. Atlantic Rogues

Chapter Two. The Novel and the Sexuality of Vagrancy

Chapter Three. Lyric Population and the Prospects of Police

Chapter Four. Settler Vagrancy

Chapter Five. Surveillance and Black Life in Equiano’s Atlantic

Coda. Toward an Abolitionist Literary History of the Police

Notes

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2020.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-300-25570-5

OCLC:

1233041206