Download or read book The Papin Sisters written by Rachel Edwards and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-08-02 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1933 killing by the Papin sisters of their mistress and her daughter was an act of unexampled violence by women against women, whose repercussions have been felt in French culture ever since. It received wide journalistic coverage at the time, and subsequently prominent literary figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet have dealt with the case, which has also formed the basis of a stage play (by Wendy Kesselmann) and films by Nico Papatakis, Nancy Meckler and Claude Chabrol. The case casts fascinating light on French provincial life between the wars, the role of women (especially unmarried ones) in French society, and French views of the criminal outsider. Its impact on psychoanalytic discourse, through the work first of Jacques Lacan, then of Francis Dupré and Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, has also been considerable, notably in its contribution to the development of the key notion of the mirror-phase. The almost obsessive recurrence of the case makes of it a fascinating prism through which to examine multiple aspects of recent French culture.
Download or read book Maids written by Katie Skelly and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scandalous true crime story about the Papin Sisters, as told by one of comics' most stylized talents. Christine Papin, an overworked live-in maid, is reunited with her younger sister, Lea, who has also been hired by the wealthy Lancelin family. They make the estate's beds, scrub the floors, and spy on the domestic strife that routinely occurs within its walls. What starts as petty theft by the maids ― who are flashing back to their tumultuous time in a convent ― shortly turns into something more nefarious. Madame Lancelin’s increasingly unhinged abuse ignites the sisters' toxic upbringing and social class exploitation and explodes into a ghastly double murder, an event that shocked and fascinated 1930s France and beyond. Maids has high bravura and high intrigue, all drawn in Skelly’s highly stylized manner, which combines the best of pop art, manga, and Eurocomics.
Download or read book The Crimes of the Papin Sisters written by Amy Delaney and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-05-28 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine Papin and L�a Papin were two French maids who murdered their employer's wife and daughter in Le Mans, France, on 2 February 1933. The murders were a shock to the country and but some saw the maids as symbols of the underclass lashing out against the rich. The case has formed the basis of a number of films and plays. This is the story of how the two unassuming sisters became murderers.
Download or read book My Sister in this House written by Wendy Ann Kesselman and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1982 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When two emotionally abused servant-sisters respond to their pent-up hostilities, brutal murder of their mistress is the result. Based on a historical incident in Le Mans, France in 1933.
Download or read book The Papin Sisters written by Rachel Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1933 killing by the Papin sisters of their mistress and her daughter was an act of unexampled violence by women against women, whose repercussions have been felt in French culture ever since. It received wide journalistic coverage at the time, and subsequently prominent literary figuressuch as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet have dealt with the case, which has also formed the basis of a stage play (by Wendy Kesselmann) and films by Nico Papatakis, Nancy Meckler and Claude Chabrol. The case casts fascinating light on French provincial life between the wars, therole of women (especially unmarried ones) in French society, and French views of the criminal outsider. Its impact on psychoanalytic discourse, through the work first of Jacques Lacan, then of Francis Dupre and Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, has also been considerable, notably in its contribution to thedevelopment of the key notion of the mirror-phase. The almost obsessive recurrence of the case makes of it a fascinating prism through which to examine multiple aspects of recent French culture.
Download or read book Insane Passions written by Christine Coffman and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.
Download or read book Surrealism and the Art of Crime written by Jonathan Paul Eburne and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Moving Targets written by Helen Birch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-08-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rampaging female has become a new clich in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage-and are quickly made into TV movies. This pioneering collection of essays looks at our enduring fascination with women who murder. The authors explore how both fictional and real women are represented, as well as the way society responds to these women. The result is an often shocking picture of female violence that covers a vast territory: the Australian outback, a Florida highway, an Austrian hospital, a French village, and Hollywood. The women are as diverse as their settings: middle-class housewives, prostitutes, house maids, nurses, high-powered professionals. There is much here to provoke controversy. Society's uncertainty over the role of premenstrual syndrome, the fear of lesbianism, female violence as self-defense against patriarchy, and "appropriate" female behavior are issues that push buttons on several levels. Moving Targets is must-reading for anyone concerned with violence and representations of women in our culture.
Download or read book Justice on Fire written by J. Patrick O'Connor and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is O’Connor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Justice on Fire describes a misguided eight-year investigation propelled by an overzealous Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent keen to retire; a mistake-riddled case conducted by a combative assistant US attorney willing to use compromised “snitch” witnesses and unwilling to admit contrary evidence; and a sentence of life without parole pronounced by a prosecution-favoring judge. In short, an abuse of government power and a travesty of justice. O’Connor’s own investigation, which uncovered evidence of witness tampering, intimidation, and prosecutorial misconduct, helped give rise to a front-page series of articles in the Kansas City Star—only to prompt a whitewashing inquiry by the Department of Justice that exonerated the lead ATF agent and named other possible perpetrators who remain unidentified and unindicted. O’Connor extends his scrutiny to this cover-up and arrives at a startling conclusion suggesting that the case of the Marlborough Five is far from closed. Journalists are not supposed to make the news. But faced with a gross injustice, and seeing no other remedy, O’Connor felt he must step in. Justice on Fire is such an intervention.
Download or read book Surrealism Feminism Psychoanalysis written by Natalya Lusty and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining historical and cultural methods of analysis with sophisticated theoretical discussions, Natalya Lusty explores how women artists and intellectuals responded to the appropriation of 'the feminine' in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Reading work by
Download or read book Indelicacy written by Amina Cain and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE "Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." —The New York Times Book Review A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams. In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.
Download or read book The Holy Man of Tours written by Dorothy Scallan and published by TAN Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Martinique to Tours, France, his life was guided toward successfully promoting this devotion. World famous for his miracles. One of the best books we have ever published! Companion book: The Golden Arrow.
Download or read book Bitter Blood written by Jerry Bledsoe and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2014-05-18 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting” #1 New York Times bestseller: A true story of three wealthy families and the unbreakable ties of blood (Kirkus Reviews). The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home. Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family. The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful, aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child “princess” and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor? In this tale of three families connected by marriage and murder, of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives, building to a truly horrifying climax that will leave you stunned. “Recreates . . . one of the most shocking crimes of recent years.” —Publishers Weekly “Absorbing suspense.” —Chicago Tribune “Astonishing . . . Brilliantly chronicled.” —Detroit Free Press “An engrossing southern gothic sure to delight fans of the true-crime genre. Bledsoe maintains the suspense with a sure hand.” —The Charlotte Observer
Download or read book The Self and Its Pleasures written by Carolyn J. Dean and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.
Download or read book Deadly Service written by Kate Clarke and published by . This book was released on 2019-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it that ignites and unleashes an uncontrollable fury, exposing the smouldering resentment in those who finally rebel against a life of servitude? Surprisingly perhaps, this type of killing is relatively rare and when one considers the degradation and exploitation experienced by generations of servants, it is remarkable indeed that so few have resorted to murder. This book contains studies of seven extraordinary cases of servants who have killed their employers, revealing the frustration and inner turmoil fostered by insecurity, poverty or greed so urgent and compelling that they were driven to kill, each in a totally different way. But in each case it achieved nothing. Kate Webster, Charles Houghton and Louisa Merrifield lost their lives on the gallows. One of the Papin sisters lost her sanity. Jane Cox, though never charged with the murder of Charles Bravo, lost Florence Bravo's friendship, her credibility and her job. As for John Lee, though he cheated death in one of the most bizarre incidents in criminal history, nevertheless wasted twenty-two years of his life in prison. Finally, the incorrigible Roy Fontaine, convicted of five murders and incarcerated for the rest of his life, time enough to reflect on his extraordinary life and truly callous killings before dying in Kingston Prison, Portsmouth, on 16 September, 2002, aged 78.
Download or read book My Pretty Vampire written by Katie Skelly and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2017-08-02 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clover — the “pretty” vampire of the title — is a Bardot-esque blonde who dreams of the (now dead) girl she once was four years ago before becoming a fanged bloodsucker. She is being kept prisoner by her brother, Marcel, who fears Clover will be hunted by the outside world (and who may have other, more selfish motivations as well). Clover’s curiosity, however, will not be suppressed: impetuous, sensual, strong-willed, and fearless, she plans her escape. The resultant havoc would make Dario Argento proud. My Pretty Vampire is a sexy, sophisticated horror romp that heralds author Katie Skelly as a powerful voice in comics. Her inherently sexy work wears its colorful Pop sensibility and keen fashion sense on its sleeve; that her strong visual style and sex-positive attitude is in the service of such strong female characters and emotionally rich work makes for a wonderfully moody, progressive, and engaging read.
Download or read book The Soong Sisters written by Emily Hahn and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If the story of the Soong family were told as fiction, people would say it was fascinating but too improbable. . . . A dramatic human chronicle . . . engrossing.” —The New York Times Book Review In the early twentieth century, few women in China were to prove so important to the rise of Chinese nationalism and liberation from tradition as the three extraordinary Soong sisters—Eling, Chingling and Mayling—who would each marry historic figures. Told with wit and verve by New Yorker correspondent Emily Hahn, a remarkable woman in her own right, the biography of the Soong sisters reveals the story of China through both World Wars. It also chronicles the changes to Shanghai as they relate to a very eccentric family that had the courage to speak out against the ruling regime. Greatly influencing the history of modern China, they interacted with their government and military to protect the lives of those who could not be heard, and appealed to the West to support China during the Japanese invasion. “[A] first-rate reportorial job on three distinguished women.” —Kirkus Reviews “A spirited, well-informed book . . . a fascinating saga . . . Hahn skillfully interweaves the personal material which she has collected in abundance with some indispensable background knowledge of Chinese history.” —The Atlantic
