The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics

"The nineteenth century was haunted by crime, by its signs, stories and the shapes of institutions designed for its regulation. That haunting persists today in a popular fear of crime that shapes political agendas, and through images presented in the media. This book analyses the legal and aesthetic discourses that combine to shape the image of the criminal, and that image's contemporary endurance." "Peter Hutchings examines a variety of texts, from literature, photography, cinema and law, and draws material from a spectrum of disciplines. He maps the evolution of the criminal spectre through the discourses of phrenology, criminology, anthropometry and psychology, and traces this spectre in the law of criminal responsibility and forensic evidentiary techniques. Emerging from these investigations is an important theoretical framework concerning formations of subjectivity that builds on Foucault, Derrida and Walter Benjamin." "This book will be of essential interest to sociologists, psychologists, cultural historians, criminologists and those working in the field of legal studies."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.