Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives


Book Description

In this book, Gregoriou explores the portrayal of the serial killer identity and its related ideology across a range of contemporary crime narratives, including detective fiction, the true crime genre and media journalism. How exactly is the serial killer consciousness portrayed, how is the killing linguistically justified, and how distinguishing is the language revolving around criminal ideology and identity across these narrative genres? By employing linguistic and content-related methods of analysis, her study aims to work toward the development of a stylistic framework on the representation of serial killer ideology across factual (i.e. media texts), factional (i.e. true crime books) and fictional (i.e. novels) murder narratives. ‘Schema’ is a term commonly used to refer to organised bundles of knowledge in our brains, which are activated once we come across situations we have previously experienced, a ‘group schema’ being one such inventory shared by many. By analysing serial murder narratives across various genres, Gregoriou uncovers a widely shared ‘group schema’ for these murderers, and questions the extent to which real criminal minds are in fact linguistically fictionalised. Gregoriou’s study of the mental functioning and representation of criminal personas can help illuminate our schematic understanding of actual criminal minds.




Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives


Book Description

In this book, Gregoriou explores the portrayal of the serial killer identity and its related ideology across a range of contemporary crime narratives, including detective fiction, the true crime genre and media journalism. How exactly is the serial killer consciousness portrayed, how is the killing linguistically justified, and how distinguishing is the language revolving around criminal ideology and identity across these narrative genres? By employing linguistic and content-related methods of analysis, her study aims to work toward the development of a stylistic framework on the representation of serial killer ideology across factual (i.e. media texts), factional (i.e. true crime books) and fictional (i.e. novels) murder narratives. ‘Schema’ is a term commonly used to refer to organised bundles of knowledge in our brains, which are activated once we come across situations we have previously experienced, a ‘group schema’ being one such inventory shared by many. By analysing serial murder narratives across various genres, Gregoriou uncovers a widely shared ‘group schema’ for these murderers, and questions the extent to which real criminal minds are in fact linguistically fictionalised. Gregoriou’s study of the mental functioning and representation of criminal personas can help illuminate our schematic understanding of actual criminal minds.




Narrative Retellings


Book Description

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.




The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience and cover core issues that include: historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism the elements of stylistic analysis that include the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view current areas of ‘hot topic’ research, such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience Each of the thirty-two chapters provides: an introduction to the subject; an overview of the history of the topic; an analysis of the main current and critical issues; a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of possible future trajectory of the subject. This handbook includes chapters written by some of the leading stylistics scholars in the world today, including Jean Boase-Beier, Joe Bray, Michael Burke, Beatrix Busse, Ronald Carter, Billy Clark, Barbara Dancygier, Catherine Emmott, Charles Forceville, Margaret Freeman, Christiana Gregoriou, Geoff Hall, Patrick Colm Hogan, Lesley Jeffries, Marina Lambrou, Michaela Mahlberg, Rocio Montoro, Nina Nørgaard, Dan Shen, Michael Toolan and Sonia Zyngier. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.




The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics


Book Description

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed 'literary linguistics', 'rhetoric', 'poetics', 'literary philology' and 'close textual reading'. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational pedagogy, computational methods, literary criticism and critical theory. Placing stylistics in its intellectual and international context, each chapter includes a detailed illustrative example and case study of stylistic practice, with arguments and methods open to examination, replication and constructive critical discussion. As an accessible guide to the theory and practice of stylistics, it will equip the reader with a clear understanding of the ethos and principles of the discipline, as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in stylistic analysis.




The Linguistics of Crime


Book Description

This book explores the social and ideological importance of crime, and the great fascination it holds, from a linguistic angle. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres.




The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies provides a comprehensive overview of English Language Studies. The book takes a three-pronged approach to examine what constitutes the phenomenon of the English language; why and in what contexts it is an important subject to study; and what the chief methodologies are that are used to study it. In 30 chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, this Handbook covers and critically examines: English Language Studies as a discipline that is changing and evolving in response to local and global pressures; definitions of English, including world Englishes, contact Englishes, and historical and colonial perspectives; the relevance of English in areas such as teaching, politics and the media; analysis of English situated in wider linguistics contexts, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies is essential reading for researchers and students working in fields related to the teaching and study of the English language in any context.




Edgar Allan Poe across Disciplines, Genres and Languages


Book Description

This collection of essays, which rediscovers Edgar Allan Poe’s not forgotten lore, comprises a two-headed scholarly body, drawing from communication and linguistics and literature, although it also includes many other academic offshoots which explore Poe’s labyrinthine and variegated imagination. The papers are classified according to two main domains, namely: (I) Edgar Allan Poe in Language, Literature and Translation Studies, and (II) Edgar Allan Poe in Communication and the Arts. In short, this book combines rigour and modernity and pays homage, with a fresh outlook, to Poe’s extra-ordinary originality and brilliant weirdness which prompted renowned authors like James Russell Lowell and Howard P. Lovecraft to claim, respectively, that “Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius” and that “Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon lights in the province of the short story. Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.”




The Millennial Detective


Book Description

International in scope and varied in its theoretical approaches, this collection of ten new critical essays examines the prevailing trends in recent crime fiction. Of particular interest are shifting, and increasingly globalized, conceptions of crime, as well as the genre's response to technological, legal, and social changes at the end of the 20th century. Employing critical tools new to crime-fiction studies, the essays also gesture toward a future for genre scholarship.




Language and Crime


Book Description

This book offers a systematic introduction to the linguistic analysis of newspaper reports on crime. The author demonstrates how the linguistic analysis of newspaper texts helps to gain insight into the construction of offenders and victims in those texts and links the findings to criminological frameworks. Tabbert employs Critical Stylistics to explore the description of participants, the presentation of speech as well as actions, states or events, and other linguistic devices employed by journalists to present a particular image of an offender or a victim in the press. This book shows the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach to reveal predominant discourse on crime in society and will be of great interest to researchers in linguistics, criminology and media studies.