Description
Book SynopsisHomicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 17981860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the unwritten law of a husband''s revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and
Trade Review
Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is an excellent reference work, one that I will use often in determining the full implication of such acts as murder and seduction, not only in pre–Civil War fiction, but also in social and psychological attitudes of the same period.
-- Philip Durham * American Quarterly *
Because the approach to an old problem is new, the book is stimulating. Because its treatment is not definitive it is provocative. It is the sort of writing that might well be used to initiate interdisciplinary discussions on both content and method.
-- Albert Morris * American Sociological Review *
