附註:Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-176) and index.
Power, narrative, and capital punishment -- Frank Norris's McTeague : Darwin and police power -- Theodore Dreiser's An American tragedy : resistance, normalization, and deterrence -- Richard Wright's Native son : rhetorical determinism -- Truman Capote's In cold blood : the novel as prison -- Norman Mailer's The executioner's song : strategies of defiance.
摘要:The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts - the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses. Five important novels - McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and the Executioner's Song - bring readers a vivid awareness of America's punitive codes. Fach details the story of a life that leads to the gallows. Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric-chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn, mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power.
