A culture of retribution: symbolic violence in legal and literary discourses on juvenile delinquency

Abstract

This article seeks to establish law and literature as two distinct yet interacting fields through which the norms of a particular culture are filtered. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, it suggests that legal and literary statements are contextualised by norms and values that exert symbolic violence to the extent that, through communication and knowledge, they define social subjects and their material practices. The specific objective of this article is to map out the network of relationships between the apparently separate fields of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and the Criminal Justice Act 1948 and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and to understand the ways in which law and literature related to symbolic violence as they created, maintained or countered norms which constituted the English culture of juvenile offenders in the 1950s.