Download or read book Deconstructing True Crime Literature written by Charlotte Barnes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical discussion of True Crime literature, arguing for the deconstruction of the genre into subgenres that better reflect a work’s contents. In analysing seminal and lesser-known works, the areas of authenticity, accuracy, and author proximity are considered to form a framework on which an individual publication’s subgenre (re)categorisation can be assessed. The book considers the likes of Ann Rule, Truman Capote, and Maggie Nelson, among other notable authors. Their works – those that fit into True Crime and those that defy categorisation within the genre as it exists – are reviewed, and their defining features critiqued. Topics such as narrative methodologies, figurative language, and utilisation of research are considered in support of this. These strands combine to a larger discussion regarding a deconstruction of True Crime, and the ways in which this will improve the social responsibility of the genre, and encourage a more conscientious consumerism of it.
Download or read book True Crime and Women written by Lili Pâquet and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing new research from true crime writers, scholars, and media practitioners around the world, this book offers fresh perspectives on how women read, write, and are portrayed in true crime stories across different platforms, including documentaries, podcasts, and TikToks. The genre of true crime is flourishing, and it is overwhelmingly consumed by women. Despite this, there is much we do not know about how women consume true crime and are represented in true crime stories of various kinds. This edited volume helps to fill this gap in our knowledge. Across ten chapters and using a variety of study methods, including creative practice, interviews, surveys, archival research, and case studies, the book reveals the multifaceted ways that true crime matters to women and suggests areas of future research. It also offers new insights on a diverse range of topics, such as racial identities, fraudsters, activism, victimisation, and deviance, as well as highlighting major cases from past to present which have influenced criminal justice responses. True Crime and Women is intended for researchers and students of criminology, literary studies, gender studies, media and journalism studies, and rhetorical studies, as well as media practitioners and writers.
Download or read book True Crime written by Mark Seltzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.
Download or read book What Happened to Paula An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood written by Katherine Dykstra and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.
Download or read book Murder in Fact written by Lana A. Whited and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the 1965 publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote declared he broke new literary ground. But Capote's "nonfiction novel" belongs to a long Naturalist tradition originating in the work of 19th-century French novelist Emile Zola. Naturalism offers a particular response to the increasing problem of violence in American life and its sociological implications. This book traces the origins of the fact-based homicide novel that emerged in the mainstream of American literature with works such as Frank Norris's McTeague and flourished in the twentieth century with works such as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Richard Wright's Native Son. At their heart is a young man isolated from community who acts out in desperate circumstances against someone who reflects his isolation. A tension develops between how society views this killer and the way he is viewed by the novelist. The crimes central to these narratives epitomize the vast gap between those who can aspire to the so-called "American dream" and those with no realistic chance of achieving it.
Download or read book Covering Darkness written by Neil Root and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writers Readers and True Crime written by Mareike Tüllmann and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The project studies the contemporary American true crime genre from both a literary and a cultural perspective. It takes as a starting point the assumption that this type of literature works up real-life crime as it is perceived, discussed, and evaluated by a cultural group. True crime, this study assumes, uses a number of strategies to communicate its nonfiction claims as well as its status as an authentic text in order to answer to postmodern skepticism concerning objectivity claims and to constructivist and epistemological considerations. The project approaches the genre from the perspective of reception studies when it suggests that the authenticity status of the texts is negotiated between writer, reader, and true crime text. In a second step, the study looks at the genre in the context of a national identity when it raises the issue of the American fascination with violence and studies the texts' appeal to the reader's sense of identity. The objective is to illuminate true crime's significance in contemporary America.
Download or read book True Crime Does Pay written by Andrew T. Burt and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines true crime's ubiquitous influence on literature, film, and culture. It dissects how true-crime narratives affect crime fiction and film, questioning how America's continual obsession with crime underscores the interplay between true crime narratives and their fictional equivalents. Throughout the 20th century, these stories represent key political and social undercurrents such as movements in religious conservatism, issues of ethnic and racial identity, and developing discourses of psychology. While generally underexplored in discussions of true crime and crime fiction, these currents show consistent shifts from liberal rehabilitative to a conservative punitive form of crime prevention and provide a new way to consider these undercurrents as culturally-engaged genre directives. I track these histories through representative, seminal texts, such as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar (1929, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952), and Barry Michael Cooper's 1980s new journalism pieces on the crack epidemic and early hip hop for the Village Voice, examining how basic crime narratives develop through cultural changes. In turn, this dissertation examines film adaptations of these narratives as well, including George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), Larry Cohen's Black Caesar (1972), Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (2010), and Mario Van Peeble's New Jack City (1991), accounting for how the medium changes the crime narrative. In doing so, I examine true crime's enduring resonance on crime narratives by charting the influence of commonly overlooked early narratives, such as execution sermons and murder ballads. I introduce the "bad man" archetype as a lens for examining how true crime has affected gangster and Blaxploitation narratives. In addition, I stress changes in the killer's understanding of popular psychology as a commentary on how crime fiction continually prioritizes the lone killer and locale as a justification for criminal actions. Through applying a consistent, long-reaching history of true crime to a study of fictional crime narratives, this dissertation stresses an understanding of how fictional elements can affect culture until the two become inseparable and stresses a comprehensive view of criminality. As such, crime serves as a cultural barometer for deconstructing the sociological, psychological, folkloric, and musicological undercurrents driving the American mythos.
Download or read book Deconstructing Organized Crime written by Joseph L. Albini and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is organized crime? There have been many answers over the decades from scholars, governments, the media, pop culture and criminals themselves. These answers cumulatively created a "Mafia Mystique" that dominated discourse until after the Cold War, when transnational organized crime emerged as a pronounced, if nebulous, threat to global security and stability. The authors focus both on the American experience that dominated organized crime scholarship in the second half of the 20th century and on the more recent global scene. Case studies show that organized crime is best understood not as a series of famous gangsters and events but as a structure of everyday life formed by numerous political, social, economic and anthropological variables. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book True Crime in American Media written by George S. Larke-Walsh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores contemporary American true crime narratives across various media formats. It dissects the popularity of true crime and the effects, both positive and negative, this popularity has on perceptions of crime and the justice system in contemporary America. As a collection of new scholarship on the development, scope, and character of true crime in twenty-first century American media, analyses stretch across film, streaming/broadcast TV, podcasts, and novels to explore the variety of ways true crime pervades modern culture. The reader is guided through a series of interconnected topics, starting with an examination of the contemporary success of true crime, the platforms involved, the narrative structures and engagement with audiences, moving on to debates on representation and the ethics involved in portraying both victims and perpetrators of crime within the genre. This collection provides new critical work on American true crime media for all interested readers, and especially scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences. It offers a significant area of research in social sciences, criminology, media, and English Literature academic disciplines.
Download or read book Evidence of Things Seen written by Sarah Weinman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Sarah Weinman, the award-winning editor of Unspeakable Acts, a groundbreaking new anthology showcasing the future of the true crime genre True crime, as an entertainment genre, has always prioritized clear narrative arcs: victims wronged, police detectives in pursuit, suspects apprehended, justice delivered. But what stories have been ignored? In Evidence of Things Seen, fourteen of the most innovative crime writers working today cast a light on the cases that give crucial insight into our society. Wesley Lowery writes about a lynching left unsolved for decades by an indifferent police force and a family’s quest for answers. Justine van der Leun reports on the thousands of women in prison for defending themselves from abuse. May Jeong reveals how the Atlanta spa shootings tell a story of America. Edited by acclaimed writer Sarah Weinman, and with an introduction by attorney and host of the Undisclosed podcast Rabia Chaudry, this anthology pulls back the curtain on how crime itself is a by-product of America’s systemic harms and inequalities. And in doing so, it reveals how the genre of true crime can be a catalyst for social change. These works combine brilliant storytelling with incisive cultural examinations—and challenge each of us to ask what justice should look like. Evidence of Things Seen introduces the new classics of true crime.
Download or read book My Dark Places written by James Ellroy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-08-19 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
Download or read book The Peyton Place Murder written by Renee Mallett and published by Wildblue Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grace Metalious, born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, came from humble beginnings. A former mill worker, mother of three, and school principal's wife, she would shock the nation in 1956 with the publication of Peyton Place, her first novel about a murder in a small town. Quickly becoming the best-selling book of its time, the sexually-charged book spawned sequels, two Hollywood movies, and a long-running television series on ABC starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal. It also made Metalious a pariah in the town where she lived, and tabloid fodder for years, ultimately leading to the her untimely death at the age of 39. Unknown to most readers, behind the fictional story about the lives and scandals of residents of a small New England town Metalious called Peyton Place, lay a dark secret based on fact. The story was, in part, inspired by a true life crime known in the press as "The Sheep Pen Murder," which took place in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in the late 1940s. In THE 'PEYTON PLACE' MURDER: The True Crime Story Behind The Novel That Shocked The Nation historian Renee Mallett skillfully weaves together the lives of Metalious and Barbara Roberts, the confessed killer behind The Sheep Pen Murder. In her book, Mallett shines a new light on the inspiration behind the shocking best-selling novel and explores what happens when true crime and literature meet.
Download or read book The Professor and the Prostitute written by Linda Wolfe and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed true-crime journalist Linda Wolfe presents the chilling case of a college professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved—plus eight other true stories that expose the psychological forces that drive seemingly respectable people to commit violent, unexpected crimes A professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, a suburban husband, and father of three, William Douglas secretly frequented Boston’s Combat Zone, a world of pimps, pushers, and porn shops. One night in 1982 he met twenty-year-old prostitute and former art student Robin Benedict, with whom he began a torrid affair that would end in murder. With the revealing psychological insights that made her previous books such riveting character studies, Wolfe depicts the catastrophic results of Douglas’s living out his secret love fantasies and the complex police investigation that brought the professor to justice. Among the eight shorter true-crime stories included in this volume is the case of the notorious Marcus twins, Manhattan gynecologists and drug addicts who were found dead together in an Upper East Side apartment. Wolfe also takes readers into the gay and transsexual clubs of 1980s New York for a twisted story of love and murder, and to the Texas suburbs, where a privileged fourteen-year-old boy takes a semiautomatic to his parents one sweltering July morning.
Download or read book True Crime An American Anthology written by Harold Schechter and published by . This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "True Crime: An American Anthology" offers a comprehensive look at the many ways in which American writers have explored crime in a multitude of aspects: the dark motives that spur it, the shock of its impact on society, and the effort to make sense of the violent extremes of human behavior.
Download or read book If You Really Loved Me written by Ann Rule and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992-04 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of crime and punishment.
Download or read book Unspeakable Acts written by Sarah Weinman and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant anthology of modern true-crime writing that illustrates the appeal of this powerful and popular genre, edited and curated by Sarah Weinman, the award-winning author of The Real Lolita The appeal of true-crime stories has never been higher. With podcasts like My Favorite Murder and In the Dark, bestsellers like I'll Be Gone in the Dark and Furious Hours, and TV hits like American Crime Story and Wild Wild Country, the cultural appetite for stories of real people doing terrible things is insatiable. Acclaimed author ofThe Real Lolitaand editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today. Michelle Dean's "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick" went viral when it first published and is the basis for the TV showThe Act and Pamela Colloff's "The Reckoning," is the gold standard for forensic journalism. There are 13 pieces in all and as a collection, they showcase writing about true crime across the broadest possible spectrum, while also reflecting what makes crime stories so transfixing and irresistible to the modern reader.
