Literary Executions
Examines literary and legal sources to document thoughts and feelings about capital punishment in the United States over the long nineteenth century.Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, Literary Executions examines representations of, responses to, and...
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| Format: | Online |
| Sprog: | engelsk |
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Johns Hopkins University Press
2022
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| Online adgang: | ONIX_20220715_9781421429267_552 |
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| _version_ | 1869530640258433024 |
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| author | Barton, John Cyril |
| author_browse | Barton, John Cyril |
| author_facet | Barton, John Cyril |
| author_sort | Barton, John Cyril |
| collection | Directory of Open Access Books |
| description | Examines literary and legal sources to document thoughts and feelings about capital punishment in the United States over the long nineteenth century.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. |
| format | Online |
| id | doab-20.500.12854ir-88805 |
| institution | Directory of Open Access Books |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| publishDateRange | 2022 |
| publishDateSort | 2022 |
| publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| publisherStr | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| record_format | ojs |
| spelling | doab-20.500.12854ir-888052024-03-30T23:23:47Z Literary Executions Barton, John Cyril Legal history thema EDItEUR::L Law::LA Jurisprudence and general issues::LAZ Legal history Examines literary and legal sources to document thoughts and feelings about capital punishment in the United States over the long nineteenth century.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. 2022-07-15T15:14:18Z 2022-07-15T15:14:18Z 2014 book ONIX_20220715_9781421429267_552 9781421429267 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/88805 eng image/jpeg Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://muse.jhu.edu/book/32640 Johns Hopkins University Press 10.1353/book.32640 10.1353/book.32640 1f9b1002-ec35-4fcf-94be-32cfd0a1dfd3 9781421429267 344 open access |
| spellingShingle | Legal history thema EDItEUR::L Law::LA Jurisprudence and general issues::LAZ Legal history Barton, John Cyril Literary Executions |
| title | Literary Executions |
| title_full | Literary Executions |
| title_fullStr | Literary Executions |
| title_full_unstemmed | Literary Executions |
| title_short | Literary Executions |
| title_sort | literary executions |
| topic | Legal history thema EDItEUR::L Law::LA Jurisprudence and general issues::LAZ Legal history |
| topic_facet | Legal history thema EDItEUR::L Law::LA Jurisprudence and general issues::LAZ Legal history |
| url | ONIX_20220715_9781421429267_552 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT bartonjohncyril literaryexecutions |