True Crime Research Articles

Observations on Violence and Modernity (review)

Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. $24.95 s. c. 185 pp.In his new book, Seltzer continues unpacking the bloody that he investigated in his earlier work, Serial Killers. This time around, he focuses on true crime and its manifestation in many genres, from film and television fiction and even architecture. Seltzer argues that the popularity of true crime genres stems from the wound culture - his term for popular and academic fixation on sites of trauma and corresponding turns neverending memorialization and what he calls proxy witnessing and referred mourning (170). wound culture itself finds a home amid reflexivity, in that the observation of observation integral forms removes people so entirely from experience of the real that violence is the preferred remedy return the real. This return creates more trauma and wounding that is then mourned and recycled through forms, perpetuating the system of violence and meta-observation.Seltzer's methodology is distinguished by its rigorous testing of the premises of what he calls the double contingency of violence and the media (23), followed by his own restructuring of those premises in a new light. This strategy, which he deploys great effect throughout the book, is based on an initial description of what he sees at work within the system of the relays between private violence and its public reportage. Then, as he says in a characteristic moment, It will then be possible this description of true crime and indicate some of its larger cultural implications (38). Appropriately for a book grappling with multiple layers of observation, Seltzer positions himself as yet another observer of the observation of observation intrinsic true crime genres. Consistently throughout the chapters, Seltzer exposes the mechanisms and processes of the system of double-observation he is critiquing, although paradoxically the system he examines depends on exposing its own processes observation. Therefore, Seltzer is re-exposing that which is already always exposed. effect on the reader/observer of Seltzer's work is not unlike that which Seltzer credits the complicit creators/observers of mediated wound culture-an almost violent longing for a return the real. This is the modus operandi of Seltzer's critique, in that replicates its vertiginous self-consciousness of observation within those who reflect upon its methodical laying-bare of reflexivity.The book opens with a wide-angle overview of the system of murder and within the cultural history of modernity. From there, he narrows his lens focus selectively on various components of the system and thicken his reading of each subsystem. first subsystem he identifies is the collective set of the conventions or protocols of true crime, in which there is always a return to the scene of the crime by way of its recreation and representation (37). Another subsystem of true crime he identifies is its creation of a bond of togetherness (57) based on shared suffering, or commiseration. A third subsystem is that operates self-replicate itself endlessly, or to keep the operations going (91). A fourth subsystem is that the mass selects and frames what observes, since cannot observe all, and observes the methodology by which selects and frames. A fifth subsystem is a forensic return the scene of the crime through reconstructions and re-enactments. final subsystem is that these operations work by their very visibility. Or, in other words: cannot play by the rules unless one sees through them: seeing through the game is part of it (162). Within each of these subsystems, he uses varied cultural artifacts as illustrations: the fiction of Patricia Highsmith, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the coverage of the infamous true-crime case The West Memphis Three, and the deliberate emptiness of post-war Berlin architecture. …

Ripperology: a study of the world's first serial killer and a literary phenomenon

- a sometimes obsessive interest in studying the crimes of Jack the Ripper - is a subject of timeless interest that has suffered from confusion, exaggeration, and hyperbole for over a century. Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper. Robin Odell's Ripperology is the first study to present a sequential history of literary investigations of Jack the Ripper's crimes and to address the seven principal phases of Ripper speculations: the initial wave of journalism that followed the 1888 murders; the revelations of highers-up in Scotland Yard who pretended to know more than they actually did; the period between 1925 and 1949 when sensational and factually shaky book-length solutions were proposed, including the theories that Jack avenged his son's syphilis or was a female midwife in disguise; the dawn of more responsible study, between 1950 and 1975, in which the author himself played an important role; better documented studies spurred by the opening of Scotland Yard files in 1976; the explosion of new Ripper hypotheses in the 1990s; and current theories, including Patricia Cornwell's DNA-based accusation of artist Walter Sickert. Ripperology does not attempt to give a detailed, encyclopaedic account of the murders. Rather, its aim is to tell the story of the extraordinary literary efforts directed at solving the mystery. While there are no formal conclusions, and this book does not seek to saturate the reader with minutiae, exaggerated claims are debunked and misconceived ideas are dispelled. Author Odell, having studied these unsolved serial killings for four decades, guides the reader in his easy narrative rich with documentation. Ripperology will be welcomed by true crime aficionados.

Getting Started with Graphic Novels

Graphic novels are an incredibly popular format in all types of libraries. Popular movies such as Batman, Spider-Man, V for Vendetta, and Sin City are all based on graphic novels or comics and underscore the growing appreciation for the medium. Readers are leading the way, demanding these titles and teaching us the joys of the graphic form. Yet despite our patrons' call for these items in our collections, it is often hard to know what to buy, what is useful and popular in a sea of seemingly odd titles and collections, and how to approach the question of suitability and classification. An academic librarian undertaking a collection-building effort at her university wrote this Alert Collector column. fact that academic librarians are paying attention to the form simply strengthens the argument that this particular type of reading experience has far exceeded its day as a boyhood pastime (if indeed that perception was ever true). Anne Behler is a reference librarian at Pennsylvania State University who works in the Maps and Gateway Libraries specifically, and in the instructional programs department (which runs the services of the library that are geared primarily toward meeting undergraduate and first-time user needs). She is the selector in charge of contemporary topics, which led her to developing Penn State's graphic novel collection. Demonstrating her commitment to student outreach, she is the co-chair of the libraries' annual open house, an event that welcomes more than four thousand students to the libraries each year, and is involved in the library's pilot effort at providing remote reference services in the university's student union building (the HUB). She is an active member of the ALA and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), serving on the Reference Services Section's Education and Professional Development for Reference Committee, as well as serving as intern for the RUSA Thomson Gale Award for Excellence in Reference and Adult Services Committee.--Editor. graphic novel format, like all forms of narrative, includes many different types of stories. For example, the superhero story is intriguingly told in Mark Waid's Kingdom Come. In this graphic novel, a slew of well-known DC Comic superheroes, such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, confront the challenges of their new generation, and not so moral, successors. teen-interest novel, those sly and moody books that explore the angst of approaching adulthood, finds particularly rich expression in the graphic format, as exemplified by Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. Satire is also a common form, best represented by Robert Crumb's work. Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond is an excellent introduction to manga, which is an extension of Japanese anime and an art form in and of itself. These works often have strong appeal with teenage girls, proving yet again that stereotypes of the format are pointless. Graphic works include nonfiction as well and cover such topics as true crime, history, science, biography, and memoir. A good example of this is the stellar work Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies, which poignantly captures the story of his mother's battle with lung cancer. Finally, adaptations such as Jerry Bingham's Beowulf take well-known stories and recreate them in a graphic format, making accessible to some readers works that would otherwise be off-putting. This rich range of reading choices not only answers our patrons' calls for titles, it adds a richness and depth to our collections and helps encourage a love of reading. graphic novel represents a format that has come into its own in the last three decades. In the words of Will Eisner, the man credited with writing the first graphic novel and coining the term for the format, The manner of [comics] creation has evolved from a work written and drawn by a single individual to a wedding between writer and artist. This has established a creative process that employs the skills of an accomplished writer and an artist of great sophistication. …

Dystopian Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader

Dystopian Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader

The Real Filth in American Psycho

The Real Filth in American Psycho

Cross-Border Crime Stories: American Media, Canadian Law, and Murder in the Internet Age

This essay examines tensions between American and Canadian legal and journalistic cultures through a discussion of Canada's best known serial murder case. The Internet and the rapid global dissemination of media texts have enabled American news reports to cross the border with increasing ease, challenging more conservative Canadian laws about freedom of expression and a criminal defendant's right to fair trial. The most recent case to test these issues involves the prosecution of Robert William Pickton for the sexual murders of 26 women in British Columbia, details of which have been under a court-sanctioned since 2002. American law, in contrast to Canadian law, allows journalists who cover criminal justice in the United States to operate in an environment of almost total freedom. American news organizations can publish or broadcast virtually any facts about a criminal case, regardless of whether the publicity could bias potential jurors or otherwise influence the administration of justice. (1) Potentially prejudicial facts of the kind that are routinely found in American crime news (e.g., information about defendants' prior criminal records, statements suspects make to police, the nature of evidence discussed at pretrial hearings (2)) are those most likely to run afoul of Canadian laws that limit what may be published or broadcast about pending criminal cases. These opposing approaches to pretrial publicity came into conflict early in the case against Pickton when American journalists at major news organizations, such as the Seattle Times, breached the publication ban, leading the court to issue the first Canadian ban on the reporting of Internet addresses in relation to the trial. This ban exceeds the normal Criminal Code limits, and in effect prevents media from steering their audiences to offending websites. (3) The court's attempt to prevent Internet media reports of the preliminary inquiry from coming into Canada is illustrative of concern about transnational media content, particularly in the wake of a 2005 political scandal and judicial inquiry involving a former prime minister in which an American blog published banned information that many Canadians were able to read via the Internet. (4) Most empirical studies on pretrial publicity in North America have focused on the impact of media reportage on juries, and the scholarly consensus is that it does not have strong effects on trial outcomes. (5) There have been no systematic studies of how pretrial publicity from the United States about Canadian cases might affect Canadians, though there has been much speculation about the issue, particularly in the wake of the Paul Bernardo--Karla Homolka prosecutions for the rape and murder of two teenage girls in the mid-1990s. (6) Comparative studies of international crime coverage have generally focused on the nature of the content with respect to the crime or criminal, leaving the cultural or legal context of the journalists largely undeveloped. (7) In addition, relatively few Canadian criminal cases have garnered intense media interest south of the border, with only five homicide prosecutions over the past 50 years generating legal skirmishes between Canadian judges and American journalists over pretrial publicity. Our research adds to the literature by examining the culturally specific legal and journalistic norms surrounding crime and pretrial coverage over a 50-year period, and in particular, how these elements play out in an age of increasingly global media flows. Our study relies on the media coverage and court documents related to five cases, which range from the slaying of a young woman in Ontario in the 1950s that was covered by American true crime magazines, to one of the most heinous homicides in Canadian history, the Bernardo-Homolka killings, ending with the Pickton trial. We argue that despite heightened fears of the possible erosion of the Canadian criminal justice system by the encroachment of American legal norms via the Internet, cross-border crime content appears to be a negotiation between legal and journalistic norms in which American journalists have generally sought accommodation over the long term rather than conflict. …

Salience of guilty knowledge test items affects accuracy in realistic mock crimes

A Guilty Knowledge Test measuring electrodermal reactions was carried out in order to investigate the quality of different questions and the validity of the test in a situation that resembled a true crime. Fifty participants were randomly assigned to commit one of two realistic mock crimes, and were later tested with GKTs concerning both the crime they had enacted and the one they had no knowledge of. Different scoring systems (SCRs and peak amplitudes as well as raw and standardised scores) were employed and compared when analyzing the results. Although there were some false positives, the test was able to differentiate between the groups of guilty and innocent participants. With the best scoring systems, the test was able to classify up to 84% of the innocent and up to 76% of the guilty correctly according to a logistic regression analysis. ROC areas reflecting these same results reached values above .80. Questions on matters that demanded the participants' attention and were easier to remember had better discriminative power. With nearly all scoring methods, there was a significant interaction between the salience of the relevant items and the guilt of the participants. Participants reacted more strongly to salient relevant items when they were guilty, while no different reactions were observed for the non-salient items between guilty and innocent participants. It is suggested that, although the Guilty Knowledge Test appears to be a valid measure of guilty knowledge even in crimes that are close to real crimes, the principles on which guilty knowledge test questions are constructed should be more clearly specified.

Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (review)

Reviewed by: Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint Elizabeth Emma Ferry Paul J. Vanderwood , Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 332 pp. Paul Vanderwood's vivid and compelling Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint focuses on one of the most intriguing devotional movements in the US-Mexican borderlands. Part true crime, part social and cultural history, part sociology of religion, Juan Soldado tells the story of Juan Castillo Morales, a young Mexican soldier who was convicted of and executed for raping and murdering 8-year-old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. The authorities in Tijuana rushed through his arrest, confession, trial, and execution in response to intense public pressure to place blame and punishment on someone for such a heinous crime. He was shot in the cemetery only a few meters from where Olga was buried, and was interred practically where he fell. Soon after, witnesses reported strange and mournful cries coming from the area of the grave and blood seeping through the pile of stones covering the dead man's body. Over time, devotion to Castillo, now known as Juan Soldado ("John the Soldier"), has spread from Tijuana all over the borderlands region. He is venerated in shrines and altars on both sides of the US-Mexico line; devotees usually see him as an innocent martyr who may have taken the blame for his military superior's offense. Like other Catholic folk saints in [End Page 561] Mexico and elsewhere, he is the object of fervent personal supplication in the form of votive offerings and pleas ("milagros" and "ex-votos".) Juan Soldado is divided into three parts: "The Crime," "Circumstances," and "Belief." "The Crime" described the little girl's disappearance on February 13, 1938, her discovery on the following morning and the turbulence of the days immediately following. The US-Mexican border was sealed and hundreds rioted in the streets, shouting, "Give us the killer or we'll burn more buildings!" Castillo was tried by a military court, court-martialed, and sentenced to execution on February 17, four days after the girl's disappearance. Hundreds attended Castillo's execution, held in the municipal cemetery, and watched as the firing squad mowed him down after he was ordered to run—a practice called the Ley Fuga (Law of Flight). Thus it was that Castillo was killed "while trying to escape," because he had been ordered to do so. At the end of this first section of the book, Vanderwood shows us the first "inklings of grace," when a newspaper reporter known as "Abajo Frontera" reported in November 1938 that people had begun to pray at the grave of Juan Castillo, and that some had begun to say that "the crime was committed by another and that [Castillo] Morales, as a Christian act, decided to take the blame upon himself." (68). Here we see the first stage of the narrative process by which the crime is sacralized and its perpetrator made the object of devotion. The rest of the book attempts to account for this process through an analysis of the social context of religious practice on the US-Mexican border. In "Circumstances," Vanderwood draws on archival research and oral histories with Olga Camacho's mothers and others to situate the Juan Soldado movement in the historical context of the Tijuana's development as a racy tourist destination, an image not always appreciated by its citizens. He points out that "Devotion such as that accorded to Juan Soldado often develops in small, out-of-the-way places, frequently locales with soiled reputations…and in areas dominated by the political brawn and economic weight of better-known, much-larger and more-important neighboring cities" (75). Tijuana certainly fits such a description: located across the border from and in the shadow of San Diego, a playground for American tourists and home of casinos, bordellos and racetracks, with, nevertheless, a large portion of the population with little connection to these pursuits. Perhaps a saint with a soiled reputation (maybe undeservedly so) is particularly attractive to Tijuanenses. Vanderwood traces multiple influences on the development of Tijuana into a place where, by the 1930s, "everyday life was a churning mixture...

True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting, 1935-1946

This article uses the true-crime radio program Gang Busters to explore the decline in the relationship between network broadcasters and their audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the 1920s and early 1930s, with no scientific structure yet available to analyze and predict audience response, radio producers created programs and genres relying on individual listeners' letters and personal observations. In this period, listener response inspired lasting changes in radio technology, genres, and institutions. By the 1940s, ratings and surveys of specialized markets shaped production choices. Radio genres and formulas had standardized and producers were no longer interested in inviting audiences to participate in the creation process but only in allowing them to express taste preferences. This breakdown of reciprocity was first evident in the case of working class and nonwhite audiences. Broadcasters asserted their authority over voices of listeners and of the poor people whose lives were documented by Gang Busters, particularly popular among children and working class people of all races. The producers of an episode about a police shooting on a farmhouse in Oklahoma clashed with Mexican farmers and other members of the community where the shooting took place. The farmers argued that the radio show glossed over the actions of the police officer who killed the Mexican owner of the farm solely because of the color of his skin, mistaking him for an American Indian criminal on the loose. Listeners' sense of entitlement also extended to the society at large. Unemployment and economic collapse led many Americans to distrust all large business institutions. The failure of broadcasters to move beyond racial stereotypes enabled local farmers and radio listeners to draw parallels between structures of power in commercial broadcasting and those in corporate business and in law enforcement.

Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

Should Commercial Misuse of Private Data be a Crime?

We live in a world of ubiquitous technology and pervasive data collection and mining. Third parties (Collectors) collect data (Data) from individuals (Consumers) of a nature and in amounts that were unimaginable or acceptable just a decade ago. In turn, that collection and the associated mining that can occur in the Collector's database create an unprecedented risk that Collectors, their employees or even hackers might appropriate or disclose Data about Consumers for economic gain or simply for perverse pleasure. This article considers whether society should impose criminal liability to address misuse of Data relating to Consumers. Our use of ubiquitous technology has resulted, and will continue to result, in new relationships whereby we now use third parties to process or store information that we used to maintain ourselves or to replace real-world relationships that are now inefficient because they are too expensive, too slow or too imprecise. Each of these changes can create the implication that we have sacrificed privacy for convenience and cost-savings. Do we lose our privacy interest in that information because it is now more efficient to collect it in a database where it can be searched and sorted in myriad ways? We conclude that Consumers do not lose their privacy interests in these circumstances because the societal benefits of pervasive, ubiquitous technology can be exploited only by sharing that privacy. In the absence of that recognition, the only alternatives are to forego utilization of the technology or resort to inefficient barriers to exploitation of privacy. The article then analyzes whether civil remedies for invasion of that privacy interest are insufficient to protect Consumers or to protect the societal interest in assuring the sharing of private information. The inefficiency and inadequacy of civil sanctions leads us to consider the possibility of criminal liability. We do so by considering two models: The true crime approach and the notion of public offenses. Public welfare offenses emerged a century ago to protect tangible items and activities. Given the increasingly critical role intangible items, including personal data, play in defining the public welfare in twenty-first century America, it seems both reasonable and prudent to use this approach to protect them, as well.

The people’s detective: true crime in Dutch folklore and popular television

Peter R. de Vries is a Dutch true crime television programme in the tradition of America’s Most Wanted. Critics say it is a threat to the moral order and the paradigm of an over-commercialized, degenerate television culture. This article argues differently: programmes such as Peter R. de Vries follow an existing tradition and morality in the history of popular culture. The 19th century saw various forms of entertainment that revolved around true crime. A comparison between these forms and the Peter R. de Vries episodes revealed striking similarities. Nevertheless, Peter R. de Vries is not a straightforward translation of folklore to television codes. The programme also incorporates features of more recent genres. Peter R. de Vries takes up a position in the vacuum between the official system of justice and the popular sense of justice, fulfilling a traditional need using new media.

True Crimes, False Confessions

True Crimes, False Confessions

True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism

True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism

True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism

True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism

Inside/out: private trauma and public knowledge in true crime documentary

Inside/out: private trauma and public knowledge in true crime documentary

Epiphora

Epiphora Tara Cottrell (bio) In the spring, I moved from an apartment near the university into a rented house on the scrubby southeast edge of Tucson. In deciding on the house, I'd focused on small things I liked: white hexagonal tile set in black grout in the bathroom, a bedroom closet I could lie down in. The scope of something as large and crucial as location was well beyond me, and so I found myself in the kind of neighborhood where everyone has dogs but nobody walks them. I heard them all the time, barking, howling, carrying on in their penned yards. I knew a couple of the neighbors. Steve next door worked a night shift somewhere—I'd hear his truck rattle into his driveway around five most mornings. Across the narrow street from me lived Candace. Candace was about three hundred pounds, with the arms of an overfed baby. It was hard to tell how old she was, the way it sometimes is with the very fat. When I moved in we had a short conversation about the shoes I was wearing. She wanted to know where I got them. "Italy," I said, which was a lie. "Oh," she crowed, "I knew it," like she could recognize a pair of Italian shoes anywhere. Predictably, Tucson was unable to produce a spring; March and April were flat, colorless things with too many days. Then, at the end of April, I started hearing gunshots. "It's that time of year," Steve said. I was standing out in my dirt yard trying to decide what to do about it. Will had been dead eight months, and I had a notion that if I could get some grass going I'd feel better about things in general. Steve was cleaning out the back of his truck. In one hand he held a hose that he directed into the flatbed, in the other, a plastic jug of bleach that he splashed around randomly. Shots were going off behind us—maybe on the next block. I flinched. "What time of year? Spring?" "Fourth of July." He paused, coughing into his elbow. "They gear up early around here." "Fourth of July? It's April," I said. He tossed the empty jug in the direction of his garage and picked up a new one from the drive. He coughed again, a burst that caught him off guard. "You better watch it, too," he said, uncapping the new jug. "People get crazy." [End Page 176] During the day I worked downtown at a museum. I was the junior inventory controller of the Native American Department, which meant I catalogued a lot of arrowheads found by industrious ten-year-old boys. I liked the boys that came in; they were without manners or subtlety. They stared at my bad eye and asked about it, while their mothers stood behind them, murmuring about politeness. I'd been through a windshield face first, and though my face had mostly held together, my eyelid had been severed by a cut that zigzagged from my hairline to the inner corner of my eye. The tear duct leaked on and off now, regardless of need or appropriateness. Epiphora, the doctors called it, a condition in which the tears accumulate in the eye and trickle over the cheek. It was a term people often got wrong: epiphone, epidermis, epiphany. Also, the way the eyelid had been put back together made one eye seem higher than the other. It gave me a slightly tilted look, so that I appeared to be perpetually trying to make sense of things. After work I'd come home, heave all the windows open and crank the evaporative cooler, an appliance that blew warmish damp air. Under its grinding and spewing, I could still hear the dogs barking. "Shut up!" I yelled out the window once, but they kept on going. When it got dark out, I ate dinner in front of true crime dramas, then went to bed, flipping the pillow all night to get the cool side next to my face. Weekends, I pulled plugs of weeds out of the dirt and tried to coax green shoots...

The Crime System

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Crime SystemMark SeltzerMark Seltzer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 30, Number 3Spring 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/421162 Views: 250Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2004 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Lorena R. Romero-Domínguez Intersections between Journalistic Documentary and True Crime in the Context of VOD Platforms: The Alcàsser Murders as a Spanish Case Study, (May 2021): 71–90.https://doi.org/10.1108/S2050-206020210000021010Nicola Glaubitz Counting (on) Crime in De Quincey and Poe: Seriality, Crime Statistics, and the Emergence of a Mass Literary Market, (May 2019): 175–190.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8_10By Mark Seltzer Parlor Games: The Apriorization of the Media Mark Seltzer, Critical Inquiry 36, no.11 (Jul 2015): 100–133.https://doi.org/10.1086/606124Douglas Anderson A Pneumatics of Mind, (Jan 2009): 47–74.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100824_3 Mark McGurl The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction Mark McGurl, Critical Inquiry 32, no.11 (Jul 2015): 102–129.https://doi.org/10.1086/498006 Bibliography, (): 261–274.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374459-012

Living to Read True Crime: Theorizations from Prison

Women in prison read, in authorized and unauthorized ways. I've learned a great deal about prisoners' reading practices from speaking with a number of incarcerated women in Minnesota, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. about their practices of reading sensational paperback books. In the words of Melissa, a twenty-seven year-old Native American woman incarcerated in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, some women in prison live to read true crime. Employees in the North Carolina prison library estimate that 75 percent of library patrons come in search of true crime books. Because overuse and theft continue to diminish the library's true crime collection which is replenished only through donations true crime fans who can afford to do so order books directly from publishers, while fans of lesser means borrow books from others' personal collections. In order to explore what it might mean for imprisoned women

Researching the multiple murderer: A comprehensive bibliography of books on specific serial, mass, and spree killers

True crime books are a useful source for researching serial killers. Unfortunately, many of these books do not include the name of the killer in the title, making it difficult to find them in a literature search. To make researching serial killers easier, we have created a comprehensive bibliography of true crime books on specific multiple murderers. This was done by identifying the names of nearly 1,800 serial killers and running searches of their names through such sources as WorldCat, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and crimelibrary.com. This listing was originally published in 2004 in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology and was last updated in August, 2012. An asterisk next to a killer’s name indicates that a timeline written by Radford University students is available on the Internet at http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial_killer_timelines.htm and an asterisk next to a book indicates that the book is available in the Radford University library. ______________________________________________________________________________________