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Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860
Daniel A Cohen
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In this innovative study, Daniel A. Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Preface
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Table of Contents
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1. An Overview: The Succession of Genres,1674—1860
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I. Saints and Sinners: The Literature of Protestant Piety
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2. Pillars of Salt and Monuments of Grace: Themes of Warning and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Crime Literature
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3. Toward a Great Awakening: Criminal Conversion Narratives in New England, 1801-1738
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II. Paradigms and Polemics: The Literature of Doctrinal Development
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4. The Road to the Scaffold: Explanations of Crime in New England Execution Sermons, 1674-1825
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5. In Defense of the Gallows: Justifications of Capital Punishment in New England Execution Sermons, 1674-1825
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III. Criminals and Innocents: The Literature of Social Insurgency
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6. A Fellowship of Thieves: Exposing a Criminal Underworld in Eighteenth-Century New England
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7. Injured Innocents: Ideological Insurgency in Crime Literature of the Early Republic
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IV. Trials and Tribuliations: The Literature of Legal Romanticism
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8. The Story of Jason Fairbanks: Trial Reports and the Rise of Sentimental Fiction
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9. The Prostitute and the Somnambulist: Rufus Choate and the Triumph of Romantic Advocacy
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10. Conclusion
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Notes
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2006
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press