Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950

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.

• 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’

“Ebury’s book is a rich archive of sources, suggestive connections, and strong readings of interest to scholars of modern literature. … Ebury’s book will be of interest to scholars of modern literature, psychoanalysis, and law, for it effectively makes the case that reading the ways these discourses are braided together in the history of capital punishment is not just generative but necessary.” (Ariela Freedman, James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 59 (3), 2022)