Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820‐1925JohnCyril Barton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925 John Cyril Barton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.Few images are layered with as much embedded meaning as the gallows. Its ascending staircase, wooden beams, and hanging rope can at once bring forth the gothic images of the state as executioner and man as amoral monster. Such is the world into which John Cyril Barton delves. Complementing the work of David S. Reynolds, Louis Masur, Daniel A. Cohen, and Karen Halttunen, Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925 explores the literary response to one of the great reform movements of the nineteenth century: the campaign to end capital punishment. According to the author, such literature should be viewed alongside anti-slavery works as essential part of the context that cultivated the flowering of the American Renaissance (22). He also persuasively argues that law and literature participated in the effort to end capital punishment, influencing each other along the way through a development of an aesthetic of crime and punishment including the use of capital punishment as a central metaphor in defining the relationship between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority.Despite the originality of Barton's argument, he is not the only scholar to recently examine the importance of literature for and in the anti-capital punishment movement, as this topic was also the central focus of Paul Christian Jones in Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment (2011). Jones argued that this movement relied heavily on literary figures writing texts... that helped move public opinion in favor of reform by reinforcing arguments about the inefficacy, injustice, and immorality of the death penalty (17). Barton acknowledges the similarities between his work and that of Jones's but correctly distinguishes several significant differences in scope, sources, and argument. Whereas Jones limited his scope to the antebellum period, Barton goes beyond the Civil War into the early twentieth century in order to show the rhetorical changes brought forth by the terrible bloodshed of the war. Additionally, while Barton and Jones at times overlap on the works of literature they examine (for example, each dedicates a chapter to the works of Herman Melville with differing conclusions on Melville's view toward the death penalty), many authors including Sylvester Judd, Walt Whitman, and E. D. E. N. South worth are featured more prominently by either Barton or Jones. …