Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany

Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany
Author: Joy Wiltenburg
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2013-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 081393303X

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

The Crime Without a Name

The Crime Without a Name
Author: Barrett Holmes Pitner
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1640095594

In this incisive blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry, journalist and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner seeks a new way to talk about racism in America An NPR Best Book of the Year Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term "genocide"), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.

Crime and Law in Media Culture

Crime and Law in Media Culture
Author: Sheila Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003
Genre: Crime in mass media
ISBN:

This work explores the situating of law and crime within the vast range and scope of contemporary media forms. Sheila Brown shows how crime and the law, or our understanding of them, are produced, reproduced, disturbed, and challenged in and through media culture.

The Culture of Crime

The Culture of Crime
Author: Craig L. LaMay
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781412836456

There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation “story” than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them. The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity—from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press. The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.

Crime Culture

Crime Culture
Author: Bran Nicol
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2010-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441140123

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American 'hard-boiled' crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Culture breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and 'true crime', crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of 'senseless' murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Criminology Goes to the Movies

Criminology Goes to the Movies
Author: Nicole Hahn Rafter
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814745296

From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.

Comic Book Crime

Comic Book Crime
Author: Nickie D. Phillips
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814764525

Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes’ calculations of “deathworthiness,” or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero’s character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.

Crime, Culture and the Media

Crime, Culture and the Media
Author: Eamonn Carrabine
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2008-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Why are newspapers and television programs filled with stories about crime and criminals? Is their portrayal of crime accurate? How do the media transform our attitudes to crime? Is fear of crime, for example, really created by the media? The book introduces the different ways in which relationships between crime and the media have been understood, including classic debates about the media's effects, news production, and moral panics, as well as more cutting-edge studies of the representation of crime in the contemporary media.

Crime and Culture

Crime and Culture
Author: René Lévy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1351947621

Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

Celebrity Culture and Crime

Celebrity Culture and Crime
Author: R. Penfold-Mounce
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2010-01-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230248306

In the 21st century celebrities and celebrity culture thrives. This book explores the much noted but little analyzed relationship between celebrity and crime. Criminals who become celebrities and celebrities who become criminals are examined, drawing on Foucault's theory of governance.