Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment
Reseña del libro "Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment"
An ex-convict struggles with his addictive yearning for prison. A law-abiding citizen broods over his pleasure in violent, illegal acts. A prison warden loses his job because he is so successful in rehabilitating criminals. These are but a few of the intriguing stories Martha Grace Duncan examines in her bold, interdisciplinary book Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons. Duncan writes: "This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns - about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds." She portrays upright citizens who harbor a strange liking for criminal deeds, and criminals who conceive of prison in positive terms: as a nurturing mother, an academy, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, or a refuge from life's trivia. In developing her unique vision, Duncan draws on literature, history, psychoanalysis, and law. Her work reveals a nonutopian world in which criminals and non-criminals--while injuring each other in obvious ways--nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising fashion. Martha Grace Duncan is Professor of Law at Emory University. She earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University and a law degree from Yale Law School, where she was Article and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She was a post-doctoral candidate at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center