Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950

This book examines how the cultural and ethical power of literature allowed writers and readers to reflect on the practice of capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US between 1890 and 1950. It explores how connections between 'high' and 'popular' culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake, analysing a range of forms including major works of canonical literature, detective fiction, plays, polemics, criminological and psychoanalytic tracts and letters and memoirs. The book addresses conceptual understandings of the modern death penalty, including themes such as confession, the gothic, life-writing and the human-animal binary. It also discusses the role of conflict in shaping the representation of capital punishment, including chapters on the Easter Rising, on World War I, on colonial and quasi-colonial conflict and on World War II. Ebury's overall approach aims to improve our understanding of the centrality of the death penalty and the role it played in major twentieth century literary movements and historical events.

Examines how literature represents and participates in debates around capital punishment in the first half of the twentieth century Incorporates original archival work on penal policy and unearths neglected literary and cultural texts Argues for the importance of the wider dissemination of psychology, which affected public perceptions of the death penalty and its representation in texts

Auteur

Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her previous publications include Modernism and Cosmology (2014) and Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings (2018), as well as several articles and chapters. The present volume has been generously supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship.

Résumé
"Ebury's book is a rich archive of sources, suggestive connections, and strong readings of interest to scholars of modern literature. ... Ebury's book will be of interest to scholars of modern literature, psychoanalysis, and law, for it effectively makes the case that reading the ways these discourses are braided together in the history of capital punishment is not just generative but necessary." (Ariela Freedman, James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 59 (3), 2022)

Contenu

Introduction: Modern Cultures of the Death Penalty.- Chapter 2: Confession and the Self in a Death Penalty Context.- Chapter 3: Psychoanalysis and the gothic death penalty.- Chapter 4: Life-writing and Capital Punishment.- Chapter 5: Animal Pain and Capital Punishment.- Chapter 6: Sex, Gender and the Death Penalty in Joyce, Yeats and the 1916 Generation.- Chapter 7: 'Literature, the Death Penalty, and War Trauma'