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Citation |
Barton JC. Law Lit. 2010; 22(2): 220-243. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2010, University of California Press) |
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DOI |
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PMID |
unavailable |
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Abstract |
This essay examines the work of William Gilmore Simms, a now-forgotten-but-then-popular antebellum writer, in terms of what I call "the literary aesthetics of crime and punishment"—a dominant aesthetics of the age. It focuses on Simms's popular "Border Romances" and reads Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia (1834), Martin Faber: The Story of a Criminal (1833 ), Beauchampe; or the Kentucky Tragedy (1842, rev. 1856), and Confessions; or The Blind Heart (1841) in light of the anti-gallows movement in antebellum America. The essay concludes by staging a comparison between Simms and Lydia Maria Child, another popular writer from the period who opposed capital punishment and who was, in many ways, Simms's opposite number. That two figures, from opposing ends of the political spectrum, could find common ground in attacking the institution of capital punishment says a great deal about the power of the anti-gallows movement in shaping the development of antebellum literature. Their common ground also suggests how that reform movement was, in turn, shaped by this literature. |