Prison Writing and the Literary World

Michelle Kelly is a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature in English at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on South African and world literature, confessional narrative forms, the intersections between law and literature, and literature and other art forms. She has published several articles on J.M.Coetzee, and is completing a monograph on Coetzee and confession. Claire Westall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her forthcoming book is The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature. She is also co-author of The Public on the Public (2015), and co-editor of both Cross-Gendered Literary Voices (2012) and Literature of an Independent England (2013).

Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xv

Introduction: A Wide and Worlded Vision of Prison Writing 1
CLAIRE WESTALL

Problems and Silences 19
1 The Credibility of Elves?: Narrative Exclusion and Prison
Writing 21
SARAH COLVIN

PoWs and Purges 39
2 German Military Internees Writing the First
World War: Gender, Irony and Humour in the Camp
Newspaper Stobsiade 41
ANNE SCHWAN
3 The Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin 58
HOWARD CAYGILL

Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making 75
4 Prison Writing and the Algerian War of Independence 77
EMILIE MORIN
5 Writing from Robben Island: National Identity and the
Apartheid Prison in South Africa 93
DANIEL ROUX6 Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History 110
JONNY STEINBERG

Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation 121
7 “His Enemy’s Language”: African American Prison Life
Writing, the Literary Forms of Institutional Power and
George Jackson’s Soledad Brother 123
SIMON ROLSTON
8 PEN and the Writer as Prisoner 139
MICHELLE KELLY
9 Scribo Ergo Sum: Creating and Publishing
Guantánamo Diary 156
MOHAMEDOU OULD SLAHI AND LARRY SIEMS
From Life to Fiction 171
10 Writing Against the Regime: Metafiction in the Arabic
Prison Novel 173
R. SHAREAH TALEGHANI
11 Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia: The Abolitionist
Politics of Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando
Saturnina and La segunda vez como farsa 189
JOEY WHITFIELD
Women, Theatre and Clean Break 207
12 Something About Us: Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity 209
CAOIMHE MCAVINCHEY
13 Unlocking Potential: The Role of Theatre Writing in
Prisons in the Work of Clean Break 227
ANNA HERRMANN, DEBORAH BRUCE AND CLARE BARSTOW

Literary Workshops 237
14 Literary Studies and the Teaching of Prison Texts 239
CLAIRE WESTALL
15 Folsom Prison Writing Workshop 256
ROGER ROBINSON

Index 257