Black Lives and Violent Minds

Abstract

Matthew Levay’s account of how modernist authors deploy criminality and crime fiction to create forms of psychological representation is particularly valuable to our current crisis around structural racism in the twenty-first century. In exploring the relationships between modernist literary representation and the expressive difficulties inherent in accessing the subjective trauma of others, Levay offers important insights into how collective and individual trauma shapes our understanding of the criminal, the police, and society’s role as witness to criminal violence, while revealing the nature of the epistemological obstacles to integrated understanding.