The penitentiary was a key institution of theVictorian era. This social control was designed by assembling modern ideas of religion, science, administrative theory, architecture, and philosophy into a means for the production of a more manageable population. Its engineers distilled a broad body of knowledge about what humans were supposed to be into a comprehensive and enormously expensive technology. As such, the institution's attempt to strip the inmate of her/his subjectivity and reinscribe the state's consensus values offers one of the most legible readings of nineteenth-century English social systems available. The literary analysis of prison writing reveals the ambitious scale of this technology by depicting its human consequences. Chapter one analyzes Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman and Edward Said's approaches to the penitentiary in a productive tension, suggesting that the consequences of the wall-to-wall and minute-to-minute management of the prisoner's experience are as significant as the broad social agenda the prison enacts. In chapter two I argue that public intellectual and radical MP Michael Davitt reconstructs his subjectivity through his representation of criminality in Leaves from a Prison Diary; or, Lectures to a 'Solitary' Audience (1885), a social critique using an empirical study of crime and criminals based on his nine years in seven English prisons. I read this intellectual study of the criminal as a means by which Davitt's publication reconstructed his identity. Chapter three analyzes The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Oscar Wilde's two other post-prison publications discursive understanding of penal discipline, arguing that after prison Wilde refined and redefined his aesthetics to concentrate on the conflict between individuals and the mechanism of the penitentiary. In chapter four I examine nationalist leader Tom Clarke's Glimpses of an Irish Felon's Prison Diary as a radical manual on surviving and resisting imprisonment drawn from nearly fifteen years segregated from the population of a convict prison as a Fenian. In the final chapter I map further study of Irish prison writing, suggesting directions for the extension of the theoretical tools available to understand the institution, the inmate's experience and the possibility of resistance.