The Prison and the American Imagination

by Caleb Smith

How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society.

Exploring legal, political, and literary texts—including the works of Dickinson, Melville, and Emerson—Smith shows how alienation and self-reliance, social death and spiritual rebirth, torture and penitence came together in the prison, a scene for the portrayal of both gothic nightmares and romantic dreams. Demonstrating how the “cellular soul” has endured since the antebellum age, The Prison and the American Imagination offers a passionate and haunting critique of the very idea of solitude in American life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and the author of The Oracle and the Curse (2013) and The Prison and the American Imagination (2009).

His edition of Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, appeared from Random House in 2016.

Smith has written about contemporary media and the arts for Avidly, Bomb, Paper Monument, Yale Review, and other venues. He is a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of No Crisis, an LARB special series on the state of criticism in the twenty-first century.

Reviews

[Malik Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed moments. The end began to lose my attention, not that it wasn't interesting, it just didn't seem as rooted as the beginning. I enjoyed most its reflection on the poetics of institutions, so to speak. I mean, the way certain discourse(s), as evidenced in his examination of early American literature, constitutes and is constituted by physical structures: the prison, the plantation, the prison-farm. Caleb has me thinking more deeply about how narratives of self-discovery through solitude participate in the carceral logic of practices like solitary confinement (maybe obvious to some?). This book can be read, also, for a succinct history of early prisons and prison reforms in America.

[Victoria Tankersley]

Fascinating history that reveals how the Civil War disrupted the development of the prison and resurrected racist schemas upon which to build prisons (e.g., the carceral plantation and convict leasing).