Literature and Criminal Justice in Antebellum America

In this well-researched and carefully constructed work, Carl Ostrowski traces the complex and evolving relationship between literary culture and criminal justice in the three decades before the Civil War. He contends that in this key period the evolution of the criminal justice system and the explosion of literary culture were fundamentally linked and provide important insight into antebellum American culture. To make his case he surveys a wide range of texts, including crime reports, prison discourse, and the narrative crime fiction of writers from George Lippard and Ned Buntline to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book's structure is interesting: Ostrowski's analysis is organized to chronicle this interrelationship by following it chronologically. Thus he begins by examining crime discourse from the time of arrest and incarceration of alleged criminals to their discharge from prison, through to their postprison experience. This structure helps illuminate a range of themes and tropes in the literature just as it facilitates a detailed treatment of plots and arguments in the works he considers

Aesthetics · Art · Criminal justice · Criminology · Economic Justice · Literature · Narrative · Period (music · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History · Law