| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Okun. Crime and Nation: Prison Reform and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786–1800. (Studies in American Popular History and Culture.) New York: Routledge. 2002. Pp. xxi, 167. $70.00.

Part of the "Studies in American Popular History and Culture" series, this book by Peter Okun is about some popular literature of the late eighteenth-century United States, but, marred by repetition and too much cultural studies jargon, it is hardly popular history. Nor is it really about prisons, reform, or the early national republic, since the author's familiarity with the secondary literature on these subjects is extremely thin. Rather, this is an analysis of the representations and discourses about crime and imprisonment in a small number of prison reform tracts and novels about crime and punishment, mostly from Philadelphia, heavily influenced by a few critics and theorists whose insights are repeated to excess, making Okun's interpretations seem more derivative than perhaps they are.

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