'Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Death Penalty, 1900-1950'

The key aim of this project is to examine how the cultural and ethical power of literature offered early twentieth-century readers opportunities for thinking through capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US in the period between 1900 and 1950. Further, during this period both literature and conceptions of justice were profoundly influenced by the developing science of psychoanalysis. In a 1926 article 'Über die Todesstrafe' Thomas Mann used Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' in support of his view that capital punishment was inherently retributive. And in fact, Freud published a short anti-death penalty tract called 'View on Capital Punishment'; his followers Theodor Reik, Hans Sachs and Marie Bonaparte would lobby powerfully against the death penalty using psychoanalytic arguments. This aspect of the history of psychoanalytic theory has been insufficiently studied, but it was one of the key ways in which psychoanalysis made a major intervention in culture, as there was a general consensus in support of the death penalty except for specific writers and specific advocacy groups. In fact, the impact on readers of literary representations of the death penalty informed by psychoanalysis cannot be overestimated, given that capital punishment was no longer a public spectacle. I will examine the way that the death penalty had gone into the cultural unconscious, its reality only accessible by means of imaginative effort, and how efforts by literature and psychoanalysis to imagine and reimagine the death penalty had a powerful effect on public debate in the period.

Further, the impact of psychoanalysis was also political since abolitionist movements were divided about the value of affect and empathy and these arguments were informed by psychoanalytic discussions. For example, in the UK, there were two differing abolitionist movements: one, The Howard League, which rejected emotive tactics and which still exists today, and the other more idiosyncratic, founded by Violet van der Elst, which used shock tactics modeled on suffragette campaigns. The project will consider how the power of literature in this context is demonstrated in, for example, the irresistible appeal of literature to campaigners in the debate: while both the American lawyer Clarence Darrow and the anti-death penalty activist Violet van der Elst published nonfictional works that advanced their causes, each were also inescapably drawn to fiction as a medium. In 1905, Darrow published a now-forgotten novel about capital punishment that influenced Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy', while in 1937, the same year that van der Elst published 'On the Gallows', and with the same press, she published a volume of popular ghost stories that reflect on judicial violence. The project will therefore examine how connections between 'high' and popular culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake.

This study is focused specifically upon Anglophone representations of the death penalty across the UK, Ireland and the USA in the period 1900-1950: as I have demonstrated in the Case for Support, this will maximise the project's originality. The major international conflicts of the period WWI and WWII, which will be addressed in a chapter of the monograph, will further ensure that I am able to address transnational aspects of the death penalty within the English language.

In short, this project seeks to critically examine how literature responds to and participates in psychoanalytic debates around capital punishment in the first half of the twentieth century, and to further reflect on the relevance of these debates for a contemporary world where the death penalty still exists. Connections between the death penalty, literature and psychoanalysis therefore present an entirely original nexus of interdisciplinary study that has the potential to transform modernist studies and to benefit a range of local, regional and national public audiences.

Academic reexamination of the death penalty in the period 1900-1950 has the potential to change public attitudes to the death penalty and to directly affect its future literary and political representations. Amnesty International notes that at least 1,634 people were executed in 25 countries in 2015, an increase of 50% on 2014. In the UK, all the major newspapers marked the 50th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in 2015 with articles and comment pieces noting lasting public support for the principle of the death penalty. With the charities that I will be working with, Sheffield Amnesty and the Howard League for Penal Reform, we will explore the history of advocacy and the effectiveness of various literary and political campaigning tactics. Further, I am prepared, through my relationships with campaigning charities, for my research to become more relevant post-Brexit while the government considers leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Justice.

My research will primarily benefit three groups:
- Firstly, charities and activist groups with interests in criminal justice and human rights including Amnesty International and the Howard League for Penal Reform
- Secondly, literary audiences with an interest in modernist literature and/or detective fiction
- Thirdly, local and regional audiences with particular interests in local history and/or in the death penalty specifically

All of these different groups will be able to learn from and participate in discussions and activities related to my research objectives and their relationship with contemporary culture and society. I will look at these stakeholders as collaborators, rather than people to be educated, and will hope to learn from their experience whether that be as contemporary campaigners, as readers of literature, or as people with a memory of and/or views on capital punishment.

Collaboration:

There are two specific partners to the project: Amnesty International and the Howard League. From my relationships with these collaborators I hope to benefit from their perspective on the death penalty as a contemporary human rights issue and from their archives and long history of engaging with the public on these issues. I hope that Sheffield Amnesty and the Howard League will benefit from considering the death penalty in a literary, theoretical and psychoanalytic framework, in addition to the sociological and political methodology that they are comfortable using, and that this would have an impact on how they campaign. In particular, I believe that collaborating with me will allow these charities to expand their tactics and to incorporate the use of literary texts and psychoanalytic arguments into their public-facing activities.

Dissemination:

An important part of the audience for this research will be local and regional and events will be organized to connect me with this section of the public including public talks, film screenings, a student exhibition (see CFS and Pathways to Impact for more detail). However, I will also reach beyond this to a national online audience through digital activities such as the project website and writing for established online literary magazines. The project website will be accessible, dynamic and news-based, particularly in its archival phase where initial findings can be quickly shared. We will also have a twitter feed for news and links to blogposts and related projects. Target publications would include widely read literary journals such as the 'LRB' and 'TLS' and established forums for accessible contemporary research such as 'The Conversation'. As part of the project I will also edit a volume of conference proceedings to be published in an interdisciplinary open access journal such as 'Open Library of Humanities', who I will approach about a special issue in the first instance.