What is it like to be imprisoned, to spend months or even years in solitary confinement? Apart from the answers that psychology, criminology of philosophy may hold, the biographical-historical... Show moreWhat is it like to be imprisoned, to spend months or even years in solitary confinement? Apart from the answers that psychology, criminology of philosophy may hold, the biographical-historical study The Hour of Truth. On Imprisonment as a Literary Experience looks at what answers literature has to offer to this question. Concentrating on the period roughly between the French Revolution up to and including the Second World War, this book mainly concerns itself with three European writers who have written about their own prison experiences: Silvio Pellico, Oscar Wilde and Albrecht Haushofer. How did those extreme experiences shape and influence the descriptions of their prison life? What does one write about in the ‘the hour of truth’, when life has been reduced to four walls and a barred window, and when all that remains of one’s authorship is a scrap of paper and a pencil? Do these three writers succeed in adequately conveying this ultimate experience to the reader? In a comparative analysis of three examples of imaginative literature (by Stendhal, Charles Dickens and the Dutch poet Jan Campert) Maarten Asscher suggests that the extreme truth of prison experience is better served by literary imagination than by autobiographical testimony. Show less
