Unwilling Executioner

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity, and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations of crime and policing--moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjowall and Wahloo to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

This edited collection offers multi-disciplinary reflections and analysis on a variety of themes centred on nineteenth century executions in the UK, many specifically related to the fundamental change in capital punishment culture as the execution moved from the public arena to behind the prison wall. By examining a period of dramatic change in punishment practice, this collection of essays provides a fresh historical perspective on nineteenth century execution culture, with a focus on Scotland, Wales and the regions of England. From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual has two parts. Part 1 addresses the criminal body and the witnessing of executions in the nineteenth century, including studies of the execution crowd and executioners’ memoirs, as well as reflections on the experience of narratives around capital punishment in museums in the present day. Part 2 explores the treatment of the execution experience in the print media, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The collection draws together contributions from the fields of Heritage and Museum Studies, History, Law, Legal History and Literary Studies, to shed new light on execution culture in nineteenth century Britain. This volume will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of criminology, heritage and museum studies, history, law, legal history, medical humanities and socio-legal studies.

Talks about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. This book examines the ethnography of the modern subject, probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. It considers what happens to individual subjectivity when environments such as communities are transformed.

This book examines how the cultural and ethical power of literature allowed writers and readers to reflect on the practice of capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US between 1890 and 1950. It explores how connections between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake, analysing a range of forms including major works of canonical literature, detective fiction, plays, polemics, criminological and psychoanalytic tracts and letters and memoirs. The book addresses conceptual understandings of the modern death penalty, including themes such as confession, the gothic, life-writing and the human-animal binary. It also discusses the role of conflict in shaping the representation of capital punishment, including chapters on the Easter Rising, on World War I, on colonial and quasi-colonial conflict and on World War II. Ebury’s overall approach aims to improve our understanding of the centrality of the death penalty and the role it played in major twentieth century literary movements and historical events.

Marxist theories have had a profound influence on crime fiction, beginning with the works of the American writers of the 1930s. This study explores the development of a Swedish Marxist noir subgenre after the 1990s through a Marxist reading of central works, from the Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler to the 1960s social crime fiction of Sjowall-Wahloo to modern bestselling authors such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Roslund & Hellstrom, Jens Lapidus, Arne Dahl and others. The works of these writers show a common thread of Marxist worldview in their portrayal of a modern world gone wrong.

This volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel.

A Companion to Crime Fiction presents the definitive guide to this popular genre from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day A collection of forty-seven newly commissioned essays from a team of leading scholars across the globe make this Companion the definitive guide to crime fiction Follows the development of the genre from its origins in the eighteenth century through to its phenomenal present day popularity Features full-length critical essays on the most significant authors and film-makers, from Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett to Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese exploring the ways in which they have shaped and influenced the field Includes extensive references to the most up-to-date scholarship, and a comprehensive bibliography

Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funeral rites of all kinds; furthermore, they explore how dying flesh and corpses are processed by means of biopolitical technologies and the ethics of (self-)care, and how the vibrant and breathing materiality of the living is transformed into stone and analogous kinds of tangible, empirical presence that engender new cartographies of memory. Each coming from a specific disciplinary perspective, authors in this volume problematize conventional ideas about the place of death in contemporary Western societies and cultures using Spain as a case study. Materials analyzed here—ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources—make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions toward death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.