Precedent and Perversity in Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon M. Setzer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance ◽  
The Aesthetic

First published in 1840, at the height of the controversy over capital punishment in England, Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death counter the movement toward political reform through their massive appeal to ancient history, poetical history, and the history of poetic form. While Wordsworth attempts to ground his authority in the biblical history reconstituted in Milton's Paradise Lost and the classical history of Lucius Junius Brutus recuperated during the French Revolution, his argument for the political imperative of the death penalty is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic imperatives of the sonnet form. The sonnet series as a whole thus betrays a perverse appropiation of literary and historical precedent as well as an uncritical acceptance of Petrarchan conventions.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

scholarly journals THE HOBBESIAN TURN

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Joseph Margolis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Creative Expression ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Western Politics

The “Hobbesian turn” is an invention out of whole cloth, a device by which to oppose the usually supposed autonomy of the aesthetic, the moral, the political, and the factual; to recover the collective holism of civilizational (or enlanguaged cultural) life; to feature the existential historicity of the human career, which is incompatible with any strict universalism and all the forms of transcendentalism; hence, also, to feature the adequacy of a contingent Lebensform in collecting the affinities of creative expression and agentive commitment within the terms of human solidarity; to abandon strict universality and necessary synthetic truths; and to favour the fluxive world of pragmatist construction rather than the indemonstrable fixities of rationalism and transcendentalism. The article proceeds largely by examining aspects of Picasso’s career and the history of Western politics spanning the sixteenth century to the present.

Capital Punishment in Independent Ireland

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Doyle ◽  
Liam O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Administration Of Justice

This is a comprehensive and nuanced historical survey of the death penalty in Ireland from the immediate post-Civil War period through to its complete abolition. Using original archival material, this book sheds light on the various social, legal and political contexts in which the death penalty operated and was discussed. In Ireland the death penalty served a dual function: as an instrument of punishment in the civilian criminal justice system, and as a weapon to combat periodic threats to the security of the state posed by the IRA. In closely examining cases dealt with in the ordinary criminal courts, this book elucidates ideas of class, gender, community and sanity and how these factors had an impact the administration of justice. The application of the death penalty also had a strong political dimension, most evident in the enactment of emergency legislation and the setting up of military courts specifically targeted at the IRA. As this book demonstrates, the civilian and the political strands converged in the story of the abolition of the death penalty in Ireland. Long after decision-makers accepted that the death penalty was no longer an acceptable punishment for ‘ordinary’ cases of murder, lingering anxieties about the threat of subversives dictated the pace of abolition and the scope of the relevant legislation.

The Entitlements of Merit

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
War Finance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Modern War

This chapter shows how the moral and social dimensions of the subject of army reform grew out of the range of questions that it generated about property and inheritance, as against merit and distinction, in determining both the composition of the French nobility and its relationship to the French royal government. Getting the peacocks to pay raised a number of political dilemmas, however. These, in turn, helped to rule out the old vision of a powerful reforming monarch as the solution to absolute government's financial problems. The political history of the French Revolution thus began with the unavailability of this alternative. Irrespective of the damage done by the argument over military reform to any plausible prospect of relying on Louis XVI to be a patriot king, the model itself pulled strongly against both the realities of modern war finance and the more urgent political need to consolidate the royal debt.

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-138
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

The Influence of Latino Ethnicity on the Imposition of the Death Penalty

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 421-431
Author(s):  
Sheri Lynn Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Related Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era

With respect to African Americans, the history of racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty is well-known, and the persistence of racial disparities in the modern era of capital punishment is well-documented. In contrast, the influence of Latino ethnicity on the imposition of the death penalty has been studied very little. A review of the limited literature reveals evidence of discrimination against Latinos. Archival studies generally find ethnicity-of-victim discrimination, and some of those studies find ethnicity-of-defendant discrimination disadvantaging Latino defendants; these findings parallel the findings of the much more robust literature investigating bias against African American defendants and victims. The controlled experimental studies generally show both ethnicity-of-defendant and ethnicity-of-victim discrimination disadvantaging Latinos. Related literature investigating stereotypes, animosity, and discrimination in other criminal justice decisions further suggests the likelihood of ethnicity discrimination in the imposition of capital punishment, as well as the need for further research.

The Death Penalty

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
State Power ◽  
Dramatic Decline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Passionate Commitment ◽  
Unique Ability

Although the death penalty often appears a timeless question, the last three centuries have witnessed dramatic changes in the frequency and organization of capital punishment in Europe and America. This essay examines the history of the death penalty and how it has reflected changing social and judicial ideas. The punishment became a target of intense complaint in the eighteenth century, which led to a dramatic decline in its use and its disappearance from public view. Yet while abolition excited passionate commitment, other groups remained committed to the retention of the death penalty, seeing it as vital to the security of society as well as a legitimate expression of a healthy emotion. The fortunes of abolition or retention have been shaped by political developments in particular nations at different times, and the penalty retains a unique ability to condense and channel powerful sentiments about the nature and goals of state power.

The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Carol S. Steiker ◽  
Jordan M. Steiker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Western Democracies

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Analysis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

The Illyrian Provinces: A Step Towards Yugoslavism

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-125
Author(s):  
Susana S. Macesich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe history of the Illyrian Provinces belongs not only to the history of the Napoleonic Era in Europe, but also to that of the development of Yugoslav history in the early part of the nineteenth century. The Provinces can be studied from several aspects: political, social, economic and cultural. This paper will emphasize only one of the offered aspects-namely the impact of the Illyrian Provinces on the concept of Yugoslavism. Three features are of singular importance: first, the effects of the ideas of the French Revolution on the Yugoslavs (development of modern nationalism, use of the vernacular, secularism, abolition of feudalism); second, the effects of the political unification of Dalmatia, Slovenia and part of Croatia under French rule, which brought Croats, Slovenes and Serbs under one political and administrative unit; third, the correlation between French rule in the Western Balkans with the national-revolutionary movements of that period, such as the Serbian uprising of 1804 and its effect upon other Yugoslavs.1

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