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Billy Budd is Herman Melville's most read work after Moby-Dick. Melville wrote the novella during the 5 years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here provide a multifaceted introduction to the work. Areas investigated include nineteenth-century political and social dynamics and the literary response they provoked, as well as the relevance of mythology and the histories of classical world and Judaeo-Christian civilization to Melville's book. Also examined are Melville's later writing, including the late poetry, the text's development, and its ambiguities. This collection will prove an invaluable resource for students of this major American writer.

Sea stories, American --- Executions and executioners in literature. --- Impressment in literature. --- Sailors in literature. --- Seamen in literature --- History and criticism. --- Melville, Herman, --- Melville, Herman --- Arts and Humanities --- Literature

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"In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--

Capital punishment in literature. --- Executions and executioners in literature. --- American literature --- Capital punishment --- Public opinion --- History and criticism. --- Public opinion. --- Moral and ethical aspects --- History. --- Abolition of capital punishment --- Death penalty --- Death sentence --- Criminal law --- Punishment --- Executions and executioners --- Legal history