Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Canuel's book is well researched and groundbreaking. Scholars of Romanticism are likely to know of scattered references to the death penalty, but few, I think, will have known before reading Canuel's provocative book of its pervasiveness as an issue of concern."
—Celeste Langan, author of Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom"
The Shadow of Death derives its strength and originality from pinpointing the persistent power—political and aesthetic—of punishment in British Romantic writing. In a series of energetic and ingenious readings of works written in an age pervaded by the rhetoric of penal reform, Canuel calls attention to various 'negotiations' between the logics of reform and sanctioned murder in order to show their inevitable mutuality. Another significant feature of Canuel's argument is the strong link between the exercise of the Romantic imagination and the exercise of corporal punishment. This is itself a forceful argument, and an original one, made in often unpredictable ways. The topic and major arguments of this book ought to be of interest not simply to scholars of the period, but also to those interested in the larger philosophical and political debates surrounding the death penalty."
—Mary A. Favret, author of Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of LettersTable of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Cain's Legacy, Nietzsche's Complaint 1 Chapter 1: "The Horrors of My Dreams" 11 Chapter 2: Uncertain Providence and Certain Punishment: Hannah More 34 Chapter 3: "Shuddering o'er the Grave": Wordsworth, Poetry, and the Punishment of Death 55 Chapter 4: Jane Austen, the Romantic Novel, and the Importance of Being Wrong 81 Chapter 5: Coleridge, Shelley, and the Poetics of Conscience 115 Chapter 6: The Two Abolitions 142 Coda: The Culture of the Death Penalty 168 Notes 177 Selected Bibliography 193 Index 203
