Cruel and Unusual
eBook - PDF

Cruel and Unusual

Punishment and U. S. Culture

  1. 304 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Cruel and Unusual

Punishment and U. S. Culture

About this book

From the excesses of Puritan patriarchs to the barbarism of slavery and on into the prison-industrial complex, punishment in the US has a long and gruesome history. In the post-Vietnam era, the prison population has increased tenfold and the death penalty has enjoyed a renaissance. Cruel and Unusual offers an exploration of the history of punishment as mediated in American culture. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, psychoanalysis and Foucault's influential work on discipline, Brian Jarvis examines a range of cultural texts, from seventeenth century execution sermons to twenty-first century prison films, to uncover the politics, economics and erotics of punishment. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary survey constructs a genealogy of cruelty through close reading of novels by Hawthorne and Melville, fictional accounts of the Rosenberg execution by Coover and Doctorow, slave narratives and prison writings by African Americans and the critically neglected genre of American prison films.

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Yes, you can access Cruel and Unusual by Brian Jarvis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Pluto Press
Year
2004
Print ISBN
9780745315386
eBook ISBN
9781849645027

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. 1. The Birth of a Prison Nation
  3. 2. The Scarlet Letter and the Long Forever of Puritan Punishment
  4. 3. Reading the Rosenbergs: The Public Burning and The Book of Daniel
  5. 4. Punishment, Resistance and the African-American Experience
  6. 5. The Whip, the Noose, the Cell and their Lover: Melville and Masochism
  7. 6. Inside the American Prison Film
  8. 7. Image Burn: A Minority Report on the Future of US Punishment
  9. Notes
  10. Bibliography
  11. Index