This book builds upon recent theoretical approaches that define queerness as more of a temporal orientation than a sexual one to explore how Edgar Allan Poe's literary works were frequently invested in imagining lives that contemporary readers can understand as queer, as they stray outside of or aggressively reject normative life paths, including heterosexual romance, marriage, and reproduction, and emphasize individuals' present desires over future plans. The book's analysis of many of Poe's best-known works, including "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," show that his attraction to the liberation of queerness is accompanied by demonstrations of extreme anxiety about the potentially terrifying consequences of non-normative choices. While Poe never resolved the conflicts in his thinking, this book argues that this compelling imaginative tension between queerness and temporal normativity is crucial to understanding his canon.

In "Against the Gallows, " Paul Christian Jones explores the intriguing cooperation of America's writers--including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Herman Melville--with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. In an age of passionate reform efforts, the antigallows movement enjoyed broad popularity, waging its campaign in legislatures, pulpits, newspapers, and literary journals. Although it failed in its ultimate goal of ending hangings across the United States, the movement did achieve various improvements in the practices of the justice system, including reducing the number of capital crimes, eliminating public executions in most northern states, and abolishing capital punishment completely in three states. Although a few historians have studied the antebellum movement against capital punishment, until now very little attention has been paid to the role of America's writers in these efforts. Jones's study recovers the relationship between the nation's literary figures and the movement against the death penalty, illustrating that the editors of literary journals actively encouraged and published antigallows writing, that popular crime novelists created a sympathy toward criminals that led readers to question the state's justifications for capital punishment, that poets crafted verse that advocated strongly for Christian sympathy for criminals that coincided with an antipathy to the death penalty, and that female sentimental writers fashioned melodramatic narratives that illustrated the injustice of the hanging and reimagined the justice system itself as a sympathetic subject capable of incorporating compassion into its workings and seeing reform rather than revenge as its ends.