A01=John Cyril Barton
American novel
Anti-gallows
Author_John Cyril Barton
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=JBCC
crime
Crime and American culture
death penalty
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
evidence
executions
gallows
law
reform
Sovereignty and responsibility
Product details
- ISBN 9781421413327
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Sep 2014
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, Literary Executions examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. John Cyril Barton creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. He looks to novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction as well as legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes, A Defence of Capital Punishment, and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which were part of the debate over the death penalty. 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 shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. Analyzing the tension between sovereignty and social responsibility in a democratic republic, Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton shows how legal forms informed literary forms and traces the emergence of the modern State in terms of the administration of lawful death. 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.
John Cyril Barton is an associate professor of English and director of the Graduate Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and coeditor of Transatlantic Sensations.
