Description
Book SynopsisDrawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, this book examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. It creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history.
Trade ReviewAn essential new effort to examine the link between literary representation and the death penalty in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America-a link that historicist criticism has left surprisingly underexplored in all areas of literary study... Barton's study of the death penalty in American literature is rich and wide-ranging... Because of its very carefully contextualized analysis of a range of authors and their approaches to the death penalty, and because the death penalty is so crucial in political and literary history for all the reasons Barton mentions, his book provides a necessary chapter in the historical analysis of nineteenth century American literature. Any scholars interested in death penalty debates-and perhaps everyone should be-will find their own understanding and research enhanced by the breadth of this book and its attention to nuances among political positions. -- Mark Canuel Review 19 A rich account of the formative power that the institution of capital punishment exerted on the construction of the American citizen-subject from colonial times through the 1920s. -- Birte Christ American Literary History
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Cultural Rhetoric of Capital Punishment
1. Anti-gallows Activism in Antebellum American Law and Literature
2. Simms, Child, and the Aesthetics of Crime and Punishment
3. Literary Executions in Cooper, Lippard, and Judd
4. Hawthorne and the Evidentiary Value of Literature
5. Melville, MacKenzie, and Military Executions
6. Capital Punishment and the Criminal Justice System in Dreiser's An American Tragedy
Epilogue: "The Death Penalty in Literature"
Notes
Index
