Death Sentences: Literature and State Killing
- Submitting institution
-
University of Oxford
: A - 26A - Modern Languages
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics : A - 26A - Modern Languages
- Output identifier
- 464
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Legenda
- ISBN
- 978-1-781885-57-4
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is the first volume to assess the contribution of a wide range of European and North-American literary works to the critique of capital punishment from the 18th to the 21st century. Morisi initiated and constructed the volume with Christ (50%/50% contribution)— identifying the need for such a comparative study, foregrounding an array of national literatures and primary sources with specialist colleagues, proposing a book structure highlighting critical intersections of lethal justice and figuration (“Fact and Fiction”, “Punishment and Performance”, “Lyric and Law”, etc.), and editing half of the chapters (bibliographies, arguments, style).
Morisi is also the sole author of the volume’s introduction (5,000 words). It provides: a historical and legal synthesis of abolitionism in the Western World since the 1960s; an overview of the philosophical and political foundations of abolitionism in Europe and the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries; the analytical framework for a reflection on law and literature regarding the particular question of State killing—arguing that representation in general and poetics in particular play a pivotal role in the conception, perpetration, and reception of this institution; and a review of the existing criticism on “capital literature” in European languages.
Lastly, Morisi authored Chapter 8 (12,000 words), which examines Hugo’s novel Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829) and combines close reading with a critical use of Rancière’s taxonomy of representational regimes. She demonstrates how Hugo denounces modern capital punishment through poetic strategies that expose the condemned man’s mental torture. The narrative is shown to undermine an orderly Aristotelian model, to stage an impossible communication with the actors of the Church and State, and to favour the emergence of a new expressive regime. These devices replace political argument to delegitimize from within the guillotine and its origins, namely a post-Revolutionary French penal law aspiring to humanitarianism.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -