A01=Mark Canuel
Admonition
Aggravation (law)
Attempt
Austen
Author_Mark Canuel
Bloody Code
Capital punishment
Category=DSBF
Censure
Complicity
Cowardice
Crime
Criticism
Cruelty
Delusion
Demagogue
Demise
Despotism
Disgust
Dismemberment
Embarrassment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Erudition
Eugene Aram
Euphemism
Exclusion
Externality
Fraud
Gibbeting
Good and evil
Hatred
Hypocrisy
Imprisonment
Impunity
In Death
Indictment
Irony
Irreligion
Judicial murder
Lament
Misery (novel)
Mourning
Murder
Narrative
Neglect
On Death Row
On Killing
Ostracism
Pain and suffering
Personal injury
Pity
Poetry
Postmodernism
Prejudice
Public execution
Punishment
Racism
Rebuke
Remorse
Reprieve (organisation)
Resentment
Retributive justice
Romanticism
Shame
Sir Samuel Romilly
Skepticism
Slavery
Stabbing
The Shadow of Death
Tort
Torture
Writing
Wrongdoing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691129617
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 29 Apr 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Shadow of Death is a timely and ambitious reassessment of English Romantic literature and the unique role it played in one of the great liberal political causes of the modern age. Mark Canuel argues that Romantic writers in Great Britain led one of the earliest assaults on the death penalty and were instrumental in bringing about penal-law reforms. He demonstrates how writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen defined the fundamental contradictions that continue to inform today's debates about capital punishment. Celebrated reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and William Ewart campaigned against the widespread use of death to punish crimes ranging from murder to petty theft, but they were most influential for initiating a system of penalties built upon conflicting motivations and justifications. Canuel examines the ways Romantic poets and novelists magnified these tensions while treating them as uniquely aesthetic opportunities, seized upon contending rationales of punishment to express imaginative power, and revealed how the imagination fueled the new penal code's disturbing vitality.
Death-penalty reform, Canuel argues, in fact emerged from a new way of thinking about punishment as a negotiation among rationales rather than a seamless whole, with leniency and severity constantly at odds. He concludes by exploring how Romantic penal reform continues to influence contemporary views about the justice--and injustice--of legal sanctions.
Mark Canuel is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of "Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830".
