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).

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.

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.

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'