Research Catalog

Sentenced to death : the American novel and capital punishment / David Guest.

Title: Sentenced to death : the American novel and capital punishment / David Guest.
Author: Guest, David, 1962-
Publication: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, c1997.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PS374.L34 G84 1997	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xx, 179 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts - the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses. Five important novels - McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and the Executioner's Song - bring readers a vivid awareness of America's punitive codes. Fach details the story of a life that leads to the gallows. Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric-chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn, mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [171]-176) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Power, narrative, and capital punishment -- Frank Norris's McTeague : Darwin and police power -- Theodore Dreiser's An American tragedy : resistance, normalization, and deterrence -- Richard Wright's Native son : rhetorical determinism -- Truman Capote's In cold blood : the novel as prison -- Norman Mailer's The executioner's song : strategies of defiance.

ISBN

0878059172 (alk. paper)
0878059180 (paper : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^96030603^

OCLC

35145797

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library