Research Catalog

Title

Literary executions : capital punishment and American culture, 1820-1925 / John Cyril Barton.

Author

Barton, John Cyril

Publication

• Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
• ©2014

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 330 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--

Alternative Title

Capital punishment and American culture, 1820-1925

Subject

• Capital punishment in literature
• Executions and executioners in literature
• American literature > 19th century > History and criticism
• American literature > 20th century > History and criticism
• Capital punishment > United States > Public opinion
• Public opinion > United States
• Capital punishment > Moral and ethical aspects > History. > United States

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: literary executions -- Anti-gallows activism in antebellum American law & literature -- Simms, Child, & the aesthetics of crime and punishment -- Literary executions in popular antebellum fiction -- Hawthorne & the evidentiary value of literature -- Melville, Mackenzie & the Somers affair -- An American travesty: capital punishment & the criminal justice system in Dreiser's An American tragedy -- Epilogue: the death penalty in literature.

Call Number

JFE 14-5954

ISBN

• 9781421413327 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 1421413329 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 9781421413334 (electronic) (canceled/invalid)
• 1421413337 (electronic) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2013033296

OCLC

862962111

Author

Barton, John Cyril, author.

Title

Literary executions : capital punishment and American culture, 1820-1925 / John Cyril Barton.

Publisher

Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Copyright Date

©2014

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JFE 14-5954