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Professor of English Doran Larson's essay, "Toward a Prison Poetics," appears in the current edition of College Literature (Summer,2010). The essay is based on Larson's research in global prison writing; it proposes that prison writing presents a genre united not only by comparable contexts and author experience, but by recurrent formal tropes.

At the same time, each prison text is expressive of the precise conditions of its author's confinement. So understood, prison writing constitutes a cohesive literary corpus as vital to the understanding of criminal and political justice-- and law's violence-- as the bodies of law and penology, with relevance in both local and transnational contexts. The thesis for this essay was first worked out in Larson's teaching English 442: Booked: Prison Writing, in the fall of 2008.

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