ABSTRACT
The law is the central mechanism used by political society to impose its meanings on civil society. By extension, literature intermittently projects and stabilises these meanings, while also having the capacity intermittently to disrupt and problematise them. Augustan writers thus found in the notion of ‘crime’ an essentially contested concept within whose meanings many different emphases could be found. The idea also provided authors with a way of exploring the pressure points of contemporary ideology, of examining in a whole range of nuanced forms the distributions of power in society. The difficulties are well expressed by Michel Foucault: Perhaps we should see this literature of crime, which proliferated around a few exemplary figures, neither as a spontaneous form of ‘popular expression’, nor as a concerted programme of propaganda and moralization. It was a locus in which two investments of penal practice met – a sort of battleground around the crime, its punishment and its memory.
