Newgate novel
The Newgate novel is a type of detective novel that was popular in Great Britain during the 1830s. The main representatives of this genre were Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth . The Newgate novelists used real-life crime cases as the basis for the plot of their novels. A common source for this was the Newgate Calendar , a biographical account of famous criminals published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Critics saw the Newgate novels as a glorification of the lives of criminals. In Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's novel Eugene Aram , the depicted criminal is e.g. B. shown as a guilty philosopher; William Harrison Ainsworth portrays the criminal in the novel Rookwood as a glamorous outlaw. In Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist and William Makepeace Thackeray's Catherine , the concept of the Newgate novel is rejected by depicting the lives of criminals in a rigorously realistic manner .
literature
- Ian Ousby (Ed.): The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 1-85326-336-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ian Ousby (ed.): The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 1-85326-336-2 , p. 667.