The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War - Couverture rigide

Smith, Caleb

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0674073088 ISBN 13 : 9780674073081

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2013

Synopsis

A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper's Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown's shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War. In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law's living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness. Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America's court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.

Revue de presse

"Caleb Smith has composed a highly-original critical genealogy of the conflict between human law and higher law and of the nineteenth-century juridical public sphere in which it was waged. The Oracle and the Curse is sure to become an interdisciplinary classic." --Donald Pease, Dartmouth College

"In The Oracle and the Curse, Caleb Smith draws on an impressive range of resources, from legal treatises to execution sermons, criminal confessions, death sentences, blasphemy trials, debates over women's preaching, and the agonizing self-policing of both conservative divines and radical abolitionists, weaving into his account insightful treatments of literary works such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A strikingly original and beautifully--even masterfully--written account of large-scale shifts in antebellum Americans' understanding of the grounds of legitimacy of the law." --Meredith McGill, Rutgers University

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0674073088
• ISBN 13: 9780674073081
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 288