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.

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’

This book examines how the cultural and ethical power of literature offered early twentieth-century readers opportunities for thinking through capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US in the period between 1890 and 1950. Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950 therefore considers how connections between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake. This book will consider a range of forms, including: short stories; pulp fiction; detective fiction; plays; polemic; criminological and psychoanalytic tracts; letters and memoirs by condemned persons and by executioners; and major works of canonical literature by authors including James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Flann O’Brien. Cases of the death penalty that sparked particular public debate and had substantial literary influence are explored, including the Roger Casement Case (UK (Ireland) 1916), the Edith Thompson case (UK,1923) and the Leopold and Loeb case (USA, 1924). 

"Through an impressive range of literary works, legal cases, and primary sources, Katherine Ebury's important book offers a fresh and powerful interpretation of how the death penalty changed the modernist literary landscape, and how modernism took up the ethical problems raised by its imposition. Ebury’s work sheds light on the submerged juridical and political charge in narrative, connecting it deftly to its historical moment and revealing the intimate ties between literature and law."                                       

—Ravit Reichman, Brown University

 "Katherine Ebury leads us through a compelling discussion of the death penalty in literature in the first half of the twentieth century, drawing on a rich range of publications, from golden-age detective fiction to memoir to canonical works, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son. Eburyputs these works into rewarding conversation with key thinkers of the era in sociology, psychoanalysis and legal theory. In doing so, Ebury provides valuable new perspectives on how the death penalty operated as subject and trope within literature and larger discourses of crime and punishment. Chapters on Executioners’ life-writing, for example, and the place of animals in thinking about capital punishment, transform our understanding of those discourses in surprising and fruitful ways. Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950 is essential reading for anyone interested in the place of the death penalty in the Anglo-Atlantic cultural imagination of the twentieth century."

—Katherine Baxter, University of Northumbria

 

"In rigorous and fascinating detail, Katherine Ebury shows the profound influence that literature’s responses to the death penalty had on public debates about capital punishment. Ebury’s discussion of the ambivalence that authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Elizabeth Bowen had towards to the death penalty shows us new aspects of some of the twentieth century’s most influential writers about crime and the psychological subject. With this book, Katherine Ebury breaks new ground, bringing together high modernist and popular literature to show the effect of psychoanalysis on writers’ discussion of criminality and capital punishment."

—Lauren Arrington, Maynooth University

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

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