Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Cultural Rhetoric of Capital Punishment -- 1 Anti-gallows Activism in Antebellum American Law and Literature -- 2 Simms, Child, and the Aesthetics of Crime and Punishment -- 3 Literary Executions in Cooper, Lippard, and Judd -- 4 Hawthorne and the Evidentiary Value of Literature -- 5 Melville, MacKenzie, and Military Executions -- 6 Capital Punishment and the Criminal Justice System in Dreiser's An American Tragedy -- Epilogue. "The Death Penalty in Literature" -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.