Serial Killers and Serial Spectators

Serial Killers and Serial Spectators
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004692800

Serial murder is a global entertainment industry where the serial killer emerges as one of the most significant cultural figures of our time. No longer an exclusively Anglo-American phenomenon, narratives of serial killing are widespread in India, China, Japan, and other cultures. This book asks why this is the case, and how serial violence has been aestheticized in different contexts. It raises important questions regarding the ethics of spectatorship, complicity, and resistance. Unique in its transnational reach, it covers both novels and visual media, both West and East, both perpetrators and witnesses.

Serial Killers

Serial Killers
Author: Peter Vronsky
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2004-10-05
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1101204621

A comprehensive examination into the frightening true crime history of serial homicide—including information on America’s most prolific serial killers such as: Jeffrey Dahmer • Ted Bundy • “Co-ed Killer” Ed Kemper • The BTK Killer • “Highway Stalker” Henry Lee Lucas • Monte Ralph Rissell • “Shoe Fetish Slayer” Jerry Brudos • “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez • “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski • Ed Gein “The Butcher of Plainfield” • “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy • Andrew Cunanan • And more... In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in Ancient Rome through fifteenth-century France on to such notorious contemporary cases as cannibal/necrophile Ed Kemper, the BTK killer, Henry Lee Lucas, Monte Ralph Rissell, Jerry Brudos, Richard Ramirez, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the emergence of what he classifies as the “serial rampage killer” such as Andrew Cunanan, who murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace. Vronsky not only offers sound theories on what makes a serial killer but also makes concrete suggestions on how to survive an encounter with one—from recognizing verbal warning signs to physical confrontational resistance. Exhaustively researched with transcripts of interviews with killers, and featuring up-to-date information on the apprehension and conviction of the Green River killer and the Beltway Snipers, Vronsky’s one-of-a-kind book covers every conceivable aspect of an endlessly riveting true crime phenomenon. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS

Creating Cultural Monsters

Creating Cultural Monsters
Author: Julie B. Wiest
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2011-06-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1439851557

Serial murderers generate an abundance of public interest, media coverage, and law enforcement attention, yet after decades of studies, serial murder researchers have been unable to answer the most important question: Why? Providing a unique and comprehensive exploration, Creating Cultural Monsters: Serial Murder in America explains connections bet

The Antihero in American Television

The Antihero in American Television
Author: Margrethe Bruun Vaage
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131750318X

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction? Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.

Hannibal's Fairy Tale

Hannibal's Fairy Tale
Author: Michelle Leigh Gompf
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2023-12-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476650934

Much has been written about the aesthetics of the television series Hannibal and its devoted fans, and some have discussed its philosophical ideas and its Gothic characteristics, but until now there has been no in-depth reading of the show as a fairy tale. However, the show positions itself as a fairy tale in its third season. Recognizing it as a fairy tale provides an understanding of its appeal and forces us to consider its lessons. Like a fairy tale, Hannibal plays with time and reality and teaches its audience about their world and how to survive in it. From the show, the audience learns both the importance and the danger of family and friends, the complicated nature of humanity containing the capability for good and evil, and the arbitrariness of society's definitions and taboos. As a fairy tale, it draws its viewers in and encourages them not only to come back time and again but to retell and even add to the story.

Female Serial Killers

Female Serial Killers
Author: Peter Vronsky
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 9780425213902

In this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women who kill—and the political, economic, social and sexual implications buried with each victim. How many of us are even remotely prepared to imagine our mothers, daughters, sisters or grandmothers as fiendish killers? For centuries we have been conditioned to think of serial murderers and psychopathic predators as men—with women registering low on our paranoia radar. Perhaps that’s why so many trusting husbands, lovers, family friends, and children have fallen prey to “the female monster.” From history’s earliest recorded cases of homicidal females to Irma Grese, the Nazi Beast of Belsen, from Britain’s notorious child-slayer Myra Hindley to ‘Honeymoon Killer’ Martha Beck to the sensational cult of Aileen Wournos—the first female serial killer-as-celebrity—to cult killers, homicidal missionaries, and our pop-culture fascination with the sexy femme fatale, Vronsky not only challenges our ordinary standards of good and evil but also defies our basic accepted perceptions of gender role and identity. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies
Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2014-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199978077

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies considers, via a variety of methodologies and combinations of interdisciplinary approaches, how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts. Organized into five parts (Narrative, History, Imagination; Emotions and Empathy; The New Unconscious; Empirical and Qualitative Studies of Literature; and Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience), the volume uses case studies from a wide range of historical periods (from the fourth century BCE to the twenty-first century) and national literary traditions (including South Asian, postcolonial anglophone and francophone, Chinese, Japanese, English, Iranian, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Spanish).

Lethal Repetition

Lethal Repetition
Author: Richard Dyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1838716890

Serial killing is an extremely rare phenomenon in reality that is none-theless remarkably widespread in the cultural imagination. Moreover, despite its rarity, it is also taken to be an expression of characteristic aspects of humanity, masculinity, or our times. Richard Dyer investigates this paradox, focusing on the notion at its heart: seriality. He considers the aesthetics of the repetition of nastiness and how this relates to the perceptions and anxieties that images of serial killing highlight in the societies that produce them. Shifting the focus away from the US, which is often seen as the home of the serial killer, Lethal Repetition instead examines serial killing in European culture and cinema – ranging from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from Britain to Romania. Spanning all brows of cinema – including avant-garde, art, mainstream and trash – Dyer provides case studies on Jack the Ripper, the equation of Nazism with serial killing, and the Italian giallo film to explore what this marginal and uncommon crime is being made to mean on European screens.

Visions and Visionaries in Contemporary Austrian Literature and Film

Visions and Visionaries in Contemporary Austrian Literature and Film
Author: Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780820461564

Visions and Visionaries is an apt title for this volume of essays on contemporary Austrian literature and film, because this collection offers insightful discussions of a gallery of significant authors and cultural figures. It also investigates important issues of style and genre, and portrays questions of Austrian identity and culture in rich contexts of recent literary and multi-media developments, cross-cultural interactions, and historical forces. This book encompasses relevant trends and notions from the past - especially the complexities of lingering effects of the Nazi era - along with issues of the future - in particular the present and anticipated interactions of culture and cyberspace. The essays are enhanced by poems by Evelyn Schlag and Gerhard Kofler.

Dangerous Ground

Dangerous Ground
Author: M. William Phelps
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2018-02-27
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0786040858

The bestselling author of Targeted shares the identity of the serial killer who co-starred with him on Dark Minds and the story of their intriguing bond. In September 2011, M. William Phelps made a decision that would change reality-based television—and his own life. He asked a convicted serial killer to act as a consultant for his TV series. Under the code name “Raven,” the murderer shared his insights into the minds of other killers and helped analyze their crimes. As the series became an international sensation, Raven became Phelps's unlikely confidante, ally—and friend. In this deeply personal account, Phelps traces his own family's dark history, and takes us into the heart and soul of a serial murderer. He also chronicles the complex relationship he developed with Raven. From questions about morality to Raven's thoughts on the still-unsolved, brutal murder of Phelps's sister-in-law, the author found himself grappling with an unwanted, unexpected, unsettling connection with a cold-blooded killer. Drawing on over seven thousand pages of letters, dozens of hours of recorded conversations, personal and Skype visits, and a friendship five years in the making, Phelps sheds new light on Raven's bloody history, including details of an unknown victim, the location of a still-buried body—and a jaw-dropping admission. All this makes for an unforgettable journey into the mind of a charming, manipulative psychopath that few would dare to know—and the determined journalist who did just that. Praise for New York Times bestselling author M. William Phelps “Anything by Phelps is an eye-opening experience.” —Suspense Magazine “Phelps is the king of true crime.” —Lynda Hirsch, Creators Syndicate columnist