Imagining the American Death Penalty - The Cultural Work of Popular Visual Representations

Imagining the American Death Penalty traces the ways in which US American culture represented capital punishment in film and television from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. The book focuses on early film, crime film noir, and legal TV series.

List of contents

• Introduction: Imagining the American Death Penalty


• PART I. THE C AMER A AND THE CHAIR , 1890-1916


• 1: New Technologies of Representation and Death


• 2: Scenes of Execution


• PART II. BL ACK FILM, WHITE FACES


• 3: Before Furman


• 4: Hollywood's "Mixed Verdict"


• PART III. PUTTING DE ATH INTO DISCOURSE


• 5: New Abolitionism, New Genre


• 6: Multiple Audience Positions in Legal Series


• Conclusion: Entertaining Ambiguity, and Imagining New Black Men and Women

About the author

Birte Christ has been teaching American Literature, Culture, and Media at Giessen University since 2009. Her work has focused on gender studies, book studies, the modernist and post-modernist novel, contemporary American politics and its media, but most importantly on Law and Literature and on the American death penalty. She has published on related issues such as the death penalty in Germany, and she has co-edited a volume on literary representations of the death penalty (Death Sentences, 2019). Her research has been supported, among others, by the American Antiquarian Society, the Karl Loewenstein Fellowship at Amherst College, and the Humboldt Foundation.

Product details

• Authors: Birte (Giessen University) Christ, Christ Birte
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2025
• EAN: 9780198935087
• ISBN: 978-0-19-893508-7
• No. of pages: 320
• Series: Law and Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LAW / Criminal Law / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, United States of America, USA, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Penology and punishment, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Criminal justice law, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism