The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. New printing processes fed a public fascination with sensational eyewitness accounts of executions and transcriptions of felon's scaffold speeches. This eight-volume facsimile edition, the first of its kind, draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later. Primary source materials include pamphlets, broadsides, scaffold speeches and newspaper reports. The stories are, at turns, tragic, brutal, pathetic, touching, pious and irreverent. They provide invaluable insights into contemporary ideas of justice and the efficacy of capital punishment. They are tangible remnants of the fragile and complex relationship between a range of oppositional influences: the powerful and the governed, church and state, the market and morality, the moral collective and the individual offender. Usually cheap, sometimes crude, and always produced for sale (and, ideally, for profit), these works also represent a vital component of England's developing print culture and the range of uses to which print media were put in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The edition includes extensive editorial material with a general introduction, section introductions, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index in the final volume. It will appeal to those studying Social and Cultural History, History of Print, History of Government and History of Crime.
This book provides an overview of capital punishment in Japan in a legal, historical, social, cultural and political context. It provides new insights into the system, challenges traditional views and arguments and seeks the real reasons behind the retention of capital punishment in Japan.
The execution narrative was a popular genre in early modern England. This facsimile edition draws together a representative selection of texts to show the evolution of the genre from the late sixteenth century to the end of public execution in England nearly 300 years later.
In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints.