Les prisons et la ville Une cartographie du châtiment dans le roman populaire au xix^e siècle

The representation of prisons plays an active role in the construction of an imaginary of the city by popular fiction in the nineteenth century. Prison constitutes, in this respect, an effective tool for dramatizing the novelistic space. To characterize the relationship between the prison and the city, the novelists favor images of continuity, flow, and reversibility, and exploit the frightening proximity between places of imprisonment and the city into which these places fit.