Literary Executions : Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925.

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 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 -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

By engaging the politics and poetics of capital punishment, Literary Executions contends that the movement to abolish the death penalty in the United States should be seen as an important part of the context that brought about the flowering of the American Renaissance during the antebellum period and that influenced literature later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.