Translated from the lyrical Farsi by a close collaborator, Behrouz Boochani's intensely metaphorical prose – all tapped methodically into the text app of a mobile telephone – oscillates between the deracinated perspective of a damaged first-person participant and an objective, journalistic eye for the systems, patterns and structures that define the obscene reality of Australia's ‘offshore detention’. The tropological operators of choice for these frenetic transits between memoir and critique are metaphor and simile, figures whose quest for imagistic singularity is conducted through the medium of generality.

There is a passage midway through Ezra Pound's seventy-fourth canto (74.314–62), the first of a new sequence composed during his incarceration at Pisa in 1945, that is representatively dizzying in its rotating frames of reference and associational logic. Its basic proposition, however, is relatively straightforward: as opposed to the philistine ‘they’ who have defaced London's old Adelphi Theatre with a new Art Deco façade (in 1930, sight unseen by Pound), and who thus stand in for the circumvolving chaos of Circe's pigsty, there are readily available signs and portents, gestures and acts, rules and principles, by which we may yet learn to live a worthy life together. This canto is the first to be offered under the sign of Paradise, albeit a paradiso compromised and imperilled in its essence by the catastrophic course of contemporary history; its embattled defence of the necessary elements of a just renewal is therefore issued in the inevitable key of irony. Pound sits in a US Army Disciplinary Training Center, as a trainee, planning what he will say to Stalin, to Truman, to Hirohito, to negotiate a just peace, and concretising his wisdom in poetic form; while all around him fascism, the ‘enormous tragedy of the dream’ (74.1), collapses under the Allied campaign and the US government prefers charges of treason against him. And yet, notwithstanding the hateful deployment of a racist epithet in the second line, there is rather more here than defiance, and considerably less than repentance. Rather, what the poet seeks to achieve is something like a metamorphic poesis of the lost cause, its prosodic transposition into broken cadences, fallen metres, gemlike verbal remains, seeds of a better day to fertilise the ruins. And prison, where Pound took his eucalyptus seedpod and text of The Unwobbling Pivot, is the ideal situation to arrange for such a metamorphosis; as, behind the barbed wire and the guard towers, with no radio over which to bark, no library with which to commune, there is only the work of form – finally, after years of avoiding the Muse, a locked door, a notebook and a pen.

Primo Levi's prose, characteristically so spare and dry, sometimes hits upon themes and materials over which it is obliged to pause and pass judgement. Judgement is not generally his metier; this he prefers, on balance, to leave to his reader. And so, his sentences tend to move ahead with the crisp and spartan dutifulness of evidentiary reportage, over which there periodically arises a broader canopy of dull irony and sour humour. From time to time, however, approaching the greatest outrages, room must be made for serious reflections and protracted asides, as the survivor's numbed chronicle of day-to-day incidents collapses into the enormity of the situation.

Angela Y. Davis, who had campaigned as a student for the release of South African political prisoners including Ruth First, first met her in exile shortly after Davis's own release from prison in 1972, ‘when I travelled to London during the mid-seventies to participate in an antiapartheid solidarity event. At the time I remember thinking that she seemed to possess the very best qualities of the most brilliant and driven scholars/activists/organisers I had encountered in my then relatively young political life.’ This close contact secures a vital link in an increasingly integrated story about the transformation of political imprisonment across the arc of the twentieth century. For Davis, a cosmopolitan communist and antiapartheid intellectual, the solidarity with First was a realisation about the spreading universality of a new social form in which she herself was ineluctably enmeshed. As First had already made clear in her memoir, the South African apartheid prison system had open affinities with the National Socialist carceral regime, on which various of its aspects (the psychology of the prison staff, the use of torture, the racialisation of the prison population) had been modelled. During her eighteen months held in the Women's Detention Center, New York, and the Marin County Jail in California, Davis would conduct research and write trenchantly about what she saw as the fascist tendencies in contemporary America. Considering the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform as a lucid account of the structures of oppression within the US prison system, Davis notes, ‘Their contention that prisons are being transformed into the “fascist concentration camps of modern America”, should not be taken lightly.’ She writes: ‘The government is not hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics […], a system of “preventive fascism”, as Marcuse has termed it, in which the role of the judicial and penal systems loom large’ (30). Written in prison, this incendiary account of ‘the world's greatest democracy’ sought to extend the lessons of what happens in the jailhouse to the broader citizenry:

I

This book is offered as a contribution to the literary scholarship of texts written by political prisoners – of one description or another – in the ‘long’ twentieth century, stretching from Oscar Wilde's two-year sentence to hard labour in the 1890s to Behrouz Boochani's seven-year detention on Manus Island more recently. It is neither criminological nor sociological in its orientation; rather, it proposes a specifically literary investigation into the properties and varieties of a particular subgenre of life-writing (sometimes in a lightly fictionalised mode) concerning the imprisonment of men and women for broadly political reasons. Although its method is principally to dwell, critically and intimately, with the individual texts themselves, looking to details of style, voice, mood and tone for information about many of the most pressing political and aesthetic qualities of modern prison writing, there is also a larger argument at play as regards the historical transformations of the carceral institution itself, in several national contexts, as the century matured. In this introduction, I will first justify my methodology and the nature of my investigations; then outline the main lineaments of this larger argument, as it weaves its arterial way through the chapters that follow.

As far as the approach taken by this study is concerned, while it shares the abiding concern of most critics engaged in this field – the sense that, as H. Bruce Franklin aptly puts it, ‘Writers scribbling away in their cells or in limited prison libraries tell us most of what we know about these dark fortresses of gloom and terror. They disclose the nasty, brutish details of the life within’ – it also departs from this overwhelmingly epistemological attitude by insisting that the style and voice of prison texts do rather more than ‘disclose’ the institutions they inscribe. Indeed, what I will want to show is that details of tone and mood, imagery and rhetoric not only add to our pool of information about the ‘obscene’ space of prison life; they create a veritable force-field of literary energy that holds that space at arms’ length, allowing for new and untold imaginative capacities to flood the carceral gloom and thence enter into our world.

In De Profundis, the greatest flowering of nineteenth-century prison writing and in many ways the culmination of a centuries-old tradition, Oscar Wilde presses the rhetorical advantages of the epistle form to establish some existential divisions between the life outside Reading Gaol and what passes for life behind the ‘iron-barred window’.

The artless artfulness of Solzhenitsyn's prose strikes a balance between an emphasis on objective, contextual determinism (how the weather, the guards, the immediate physical circumstances oblige his characters to behave) and the surly subjectivism of his protagonist's free indirect discourse. In the sparks thrown off by the friction between these two registers the narrator finds opportunities either to make general statements and (much rarer) moral judgements, or to render them implicitly. The first site of tension in a narrative explicitly organised around a single winter's day is between the generally iterative (the abstract repetitiousness of prison narration familiar from Berkman and Pound) and the seasonally adjusted temporal continuum of a largely outdoor Gulag existence.

Alexander Berkman's prose, an energetic English beaten out of vigorous Russian timbres, prefers description to narration; or, more accurately, imparts much of its frustrated narrative momentum to the business of description. One of the reasons for that redistribution of force is simply the disappearance of incident relative to the infinite dilation and empty succession of prison time – sentenced to twenty-two years for the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick in 1892, and serving fourteen, Berkman exists in a space essentially out of time. In a situation where, for the most part, nothing happens, the effort to wrest experience from that blank expanse of unmarked temporality falls to a language in which absence thickens, assumes mythic dimensions, while speculative lines are drawn between the inert ‘no part’ being played by the imprisoned subject and distant ‘life’ itself.

In the last chapter, I discussed the three means of divine communication enumerated by Posidonius: the personal appearance of a god, the mediation of daimons, and the innate capacity of the soul. Of these, the most direct way that a god can communicate is by appearing in person to a human being, either in a dream or a waking vision. Paul claims to have received knowledge through such means on at least two specific occasions (Gal 1:11–12; 2 Cor 12:1–10), and displays a certain ambivalence about how these fit into the mechanics he works out elsewhere (2 Cor 12:2–3).

Scholarship is divided over how to view the place of visionary experiences in Paul’s life. Some fully embrace the image of Paul as mystic and visionary.A more common approach is to sharply distinguish Paul’s initial encounter with the risen Christ from any subsequent visionary experiences – the former being a pivotal moment of objective revelation and the latter being private and subjective spiritual experiences to which he attaches little importance.Among those who compare Paul’s claims to visionary experience with his broader Graeco-Roman environment, the tendency is to view Paul’s visions not as a method of divination – a means through which to acquire divine knowledge – but as a means through which to assert divine authority. Such experiences are important for his rhetoric, but less so for his thought and practice.

In this chapter, I will assess the nature and functions of Paul’s visionary experiences in comparison with the divinatory functions of dreams and visions in the Graeco-Roman world. Such visions did indeed play a pivotal role in establishing Paul’s authority as an apostle, but this is inextricably intertwined with their role as conveyors of divine knowledge, and they thus form an important part of Paul’s divinatory repertoire.

Dreams, Visions, and Experience: Preliminary Issues

The mode of divination in which “the gods in person converse with men” (Cicero, Div. 1.64) at first sight appears the most straightforward, but it presents particular challenges to historical analysis and classification. Before proceeding, two particular questions must be dealt with. First is how to distinguish and classify dreams, epiphanies, and waking visions in the context of divination. Second is how to treat the relation of dream and vision reports to actual experience.

Dreams

Dreams are a ubiquitous source of divine communication in ancient literature.

The Absence at the Heart of Home

In December 1908 Katherine Mansfield noted: ‘I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater's “Child in the House”. About a girl in Wellington.’ This project started to materialise in March 1915, when she began a novel called Karori, which was however abandoned. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp's visit to London in August 1915 triggered further memories and these took shape in ‘The Wind Blows’ (1920), a first version of which was published as ‘Autumns: II’ in Signature on 4 October 1915, three days before Leslie died while training for war.

Mansfield's bereavement prompted an identification with Leslie that not only translated into the need to share her living experiences with her dead brother (‘I never see anything that I like, or hear anything, without the longing that he should see and hear, too’), but which also entailed a reversal of her expectations and authorial stance:

This emotional crisis proved conducive to a new source of inspiration, which Mansfield perceived as contrasting with her previous creative concerns as she noted in January 1916:

The result of this aesthetic shift was Mansfield's momentous decision to write recollections of her ‘undiscovered country’, making New Zealand ‘leap into the eyes of the old world […] with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow because you, my little sun of it, are set’.

During the First World War, humans and animals became entangled in complex ways. According to the British Imperial War Museum, more than 16 million animals served in the First World War and were critical for the war effort. Naval cat mascots, messenger dogs, pack horses and more, all produced an emotional outpouring of soldier love, illustrated in a popular and famous poster, Fortunino Matania's ‘Goodbye Old Man’, currently owned by the Blue Cross. A wounded horse struggles on the ground as a soldier cradles the horse's head and kisses it. An animal's death was somewhat more distressing than a soldier's because animals could not understand what was happening and it was not their choice to go. As a signaller in the Royal Field Artillery explained:

Katherine Mansfield, whose beloved brother died from a faulty hand grenade during a training exercise in 1915, also understood that human violence extends to the animal and was troubled by animal death. Headless corpses of animals seemed to have haunted her. Her empathy for animals in her fiction parallels British society's growing empathy for animals, a direct result of First World War mass death.