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"I put my fingers around my throat and squeezed it, to know how it feels": Antigallows Sentimentalism and E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand

Although it has gone unacknowledged in literary studies, it is quite likely that E. D. E. N. Southworth wrote more about the death penalty than any other American novelist in the nineteenth century. In many of her best-selling works, Southworth offers her readers plots that illustrate the injustice, immorality, and inefficacy of capital punishment and that argue for its abolition through their sentimental depictions of characters-both guilty and innocent-facing the gallows. In this essay, I explore the role that Southworth's fiction played in this reform effort in order to make two central observations. First, I argue that Southworth's fiction demonstrates how the common sentimental ...

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