Death sentences: literature and state killing

Book : Edited book

As Albert Camus once remarked: 'Of capital punishment, people write only in a low voice.' Journalists and state officials alike use a carefully policed language, low in intensity, when making any reference to the death penalty. Does fiction provide a counterbalance for that discretion, or simply echo it? What other perspectives can it bring into the foreground, and can literary language express a response to a allegedly necessary horror, or a terrible injustice, which other voices or media cannot?

Considering a range of major works from across Western Europe and the United States, from the 18th to the 21st century, Death Sentences investigates the contribution of poetics to our understanding, past and present, of capital punishment. The sophisticated literary representations found in Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others offer a privileged vantage point from which to illuminate and critique a unique institution which itself relies heavily on spectacle and representation to be operative and legitimized.

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Legenda
• Pages: 1-258
• Series: Studies in Comparative Literature
• Series number: 49
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2019-04-23
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv16km0wd
• EISBN: 9781781885598
• ISBN: 9781781885574
• Language: English
• Subtype: Edited book