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, 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 figuresJames Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiserand 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 writersparticularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippardwhose work helped shape or was in turn 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 from later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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
""Overall, Barton's Literary Executions is an originally executed and consistently compelling study that resurrects and foregrounds the second abolition movement of the American nineteenth century... Through innovative cross-examinations and nuanced close readings, Barton lays the groundwork for a further and much needed analysis of the real influence wielded by literature in the debate around the abolition of lawful death.""
