Subject of Murder

图书信息

作者	Downing, Lisa
出版社	University of Chicago Press
ISBN	9780226003689
出版时间	2013-01-05
字数	48.5万
分类	University of Chicago Press,进口书,外文原版书,科技,医学

读书简介

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen-a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive typeAre they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screenOr are murderers something else entirely?In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

目录

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I . Murder and Gender in the European Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1. "Real Murderer and False Poet": Pierre-François Lacenaire

Chapter 2. The "Angel of Arsenic": Marie Lafarge

Chapter 3. The Beast in Man: Jack and the Rippers Who Came After

Part II. The Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Killer

Chapter 4. "Infanticidal" Femininity: Myra Hindley

Chapter 5. "Monochrome Man": Dennis Nilsen

Chapter 6. Serial Killing and the Dissident Woman: Aileen Wuornos

Chapter 7. Kids Who Kill: Defying the Stereotype of the Murderer

By Way of Brief Conclusion . . .

Notes

Index