The United States set about defining and reforming its criminal justice institutions during the antebellum years, just as an innovative, expanding print culture afforded authors and publishers unprecedented opportunities to reflect on these important social developments. Carl Ostrowski traces the impact of these related historical processes on American literature, identifying a set of culturally resonant narratives that emerged from criminal justice-related discourse to shape the period's national literary expression.

Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including newspaper arrest reports, prison reform periodicals, popular literary magazines, transatlantic travel narratives, popular crime novels, anthologies of prison poetry, and the memoirs of prison chaplains, Ostrowski analyzes how authors as canonical as Nathaniel Hawthorne and as obscure as counterfeiter/poet/prison inmate Christian Meadows adapted, manipulated, or rejected prevailing narratives about criminality to serve their artistic and rhetorical ends. These narratives led to the creation of new literary subgenres while also ushering in psychological interiority as an important criterion by which serious fiction was judged. Ostrowski joins and extends recent scholarly conversations on subjects including African American civic agency, literary sentimentalism, outsider authorship, and the racial politics of antebellum prison reform.

Carl Ostrowski is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University and author of Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783–1861 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

"This book is thoughtful, often insightful, and brings useful attention to little known or undervalued antebellum texts, relating to various aspects of the American criminal justice system and the experience of incarceration and release."—Laura Korobkin, author of Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery

"Ostrowski's provocative claims about the centrality of carceral conversion narratives for the development of psychological interiority in American literature and about the role of vigilantism in the development of African American civil agency are well worth the read. Highly recommended."—Choice

"[W]hile Ostrowski looks to intervene in a critical narrative about the racial politics of reform, what he offers instead is a crucial history of print culture's role in the messy, often muddled, but utterly inextricable relationship between race and criminal justice in America. In this sense, Literature and Criminal Justice in Antebellum America presents an indispensable archive for the age of mass incarceration—one that allows us to appreciate fully the contradictions of the US's carceral regime and the literature devoted to it."—American Literary History

"The strength of Literature and Criminal Justice in Antebellum America lies in its combination of engaging, accessible prose and an impressive breadth of source material. Ostrowski deftly demonstrates how, across multiple print venues, stories of prison and criminality were 'endorsed, adapted, modified, or challenged' to suit an array of 'political views, artistic choices, reform impulses, and commercial imperatives of individual authors, editors, and publishers.'"—American Periodicals