ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the controversy over capital punishment, which during this period transformed from a public ritual into an exercise of power that took place out of public view. It then focuses on the popular crime literature that flourished during the nineteenth century, as the published execution sermons and confessions that dominated earlier decades came to be supplanted by an increasingly secular and generically varied array of representations. The chapter examines the new types of spectacle that this development made possible by analyzing the architecture of nineteenth-century courthouses and courtrooms, along with the concomitant development of courtroom fiction, a genre that first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and that illustrates, in particularly dramatic fashion, how print culture and courtroom space functioned as mechanisms through which the public could observe the spectacle of the law. The chapter concludes with a discussion of lynching, an extralegal spectacle that took up the display of violence that the state openly disavowed.
