ABSTRACT
Why do writers in prison have the “credibility of elves”? This chapter explores how and why writing from prisons is culturally overlooked and prisoner experience excluded, and assesses the relation between imprisonment and writing as an epistemological and narrative problem that has real-life consequences. Writers in prison offer resistance to both cultural stereotypes and the “total institution”; but just as the writer in prison is never simply free to write, the reader of prison writing is never simply free to read. To engage with the writing of marginalised groups is to “dance through the minefield”, because it risks contagion: participation by association in life-threatening narrative exclusion. This chapter’s carceral points of reference are the UK, North America and Germany after 1945; in the last case, the shifting political iterations of the nation (East Germany, West Germany and West Berlin, and the unified Federal Republic) help illuminate the relationship between politics, prisons, culture and narrative exclusion.
