A Criminology Of Narrative Fiction


Book Description

Drawing on complex narratives across film, TV, novels and graphic novels, this authoritative critical analysis demonstrates the value of fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm. McGregor establishes an original theory of the criminological value of fiction.




Narrative Criminology


Book Description

Explores the role of stories in criminal culture and justice systems around the world Stories are much more than a means of communication—stories help us shape our identities, make sense of the world, and mobilize others to action. In Narrative Criminology, prominent scholars from across the academy and around the world examine stories that animate offending. From an examination of how criminals understand certain types of crime to be less moral than others, to how violent offenders and drug users each come to understand or resist their identity as ‘criminals’, to how cultural narratives motivate genocidal action, the case studies in this book cover a wide array of crimes and justice systems throughout the world. The contributors uncover the narratives at the center of their essays through qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and written archives, and they scrutinize narrative structure and meaning by analyzing genres, plots, metaphors, and other components of storytelling. In doing so, they reveal the cognitive, ideological, and institutional mechanisms by which narratives promote harmful action. Finally, they consider how offenders’ narratives are linked to and emerge from those of conventional society or specific subcultures. Each chapter reveals important insights and elements for the development of a framework of narrative criminology as an important approach for understanding crime and criminal justice. An unprecedented and landmark collection, Narrative Criminology opens the door for an exciting new field of study on the role of stories in motivating and legitimizing harm.




The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology


Book Description

Over 23 chapters this Handbook reflects the diversity of methodological approaches employed in the emerging field of narrative criminology.




Narrative Justice


Book Description

This book introduces narrative justice, a new theory of aesthetic education – the thesis that the cultivation of aesthetic or artistic sensibility can both improve moral character and achieve political justice. The author argues that there is a subcategory of narrative representations that provide moral knowledge regardless of their categorisation as fiction or non-fiction, and which therefore can be employed as a means of moral improvement. McGregor applies this narrative ethics to the criminology of inhumanity, including both crimes against humanity and terrorism. Expanding on the methodology of narrative criminology, he demonstrates that narrative representations can be employed to evaluate responsibility for inhumanity, to understand the psychology of inhumanity, and to undermine inhumanity – and are thus a means to the end of opposing injustice. He concludes that the cultivation of narrative sensibility is an important tool for both moral improvement and political justice.




The Case of Literature


Book Description

In The Case of Literature, Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The Case of Literature deftly traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Höcker demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. He argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.




The Value of Literature


Book Description

In The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach – the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content – to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity – in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself.




Imaginative Criminology


Book Description

This distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression are lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement, including prison and borders, and spaces of resistance. Examples range from camps where asylum seekers and migrants are confined, to the exploration of deviant identities and the imagined spaces of surveillance and control in young adult fiction. Drawing on oral history, fictive portrayals, walking methodologies, and ethnographic and arts-based research, the book pays attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, mobility and nationality as they intersect with lived and imagined space.




Criminology Goes to the Movies


Book Description

From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.




Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism


Book Description

Establishing a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, Rafe McGregor proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society.




The Narrative of John Smith


Book Description

"This text has been published from an untitled manuscript that was among the Conan Doyle papers sold at aution in 2004 and acquired by the British Library."--P. [121].