Deconstructing True Crime Literature

2023-10-13 Literary Criticism

Author : Charlotte Barnes
Release : 2023-10-13
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 459/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Deconstructing True Crime Literature by : Charlotte Barnes

Download or read book Deconstructing True Crime Literature written by Charlotte Barnes. This book was released on 2023-10-13. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical discussion of True Crime literature, arguing for the deconstruction of the genre into subgenres that better reflect a work’s contents. In analysing seminal and lesser-known works, the areas of authenticity, accuracy, and author proximity are considered to form a framework on which an individual publication’s subgenre (re)categorisation can be assessed. The book considers the likes of Ann Rule, Truman Capote, and Maggie Nelson, among other notable authors. Their works – those that fit into True Crime and those that defy categorisation within the genre as it exists – are reviewed, and their defining features critiqued. Topics such as narrative methodologies, figurative language, and utilisation of research are considered in support of this. These strands combine to a larger discussion regarding a deconstruction of True Crime, and the ways in which this will improve the social responsibility of the genre, and encourage a more conscientious consumerism of it.

True Crime

2013-10-18 Social Science

Author : Mark Seltzer
Release : 2013-10-18
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 399/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis True Crime by : Mark Seltzer

Download or read book True Crime written by Mark Seltzer. This book was released on 2013-10-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.

Murder, in Fact

2020-11-10 Literary Criticism

Author : Lana A. Whited
Release : 2020-11-10
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 245/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Murder, in Fact by : Lana A. Whited

Download or read book Murder, in Fact written by Lana A. Whited. This book was released on 2020-11-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the 1965 publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote declared he broke new literary ground. But Capote's "nonfiction novel" belongs to a long Naturalist tradition originating in the work of 19th-century French novelist Emile Zola. Naturalism offers a particular response to the increasing problem of violence in American life and its sociological implications. This book traces the origins of the fact-based homicide novel that emerged in the mainstream of American literature with works such as Frank Norris's McTeague and flourished in the twentieth century with works such as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Richard Wright's Native Son. At their heart is a young man isolated from community who acts out in desperate circumstances against someone who reflects his isolation. A tension develops between how society views this killer and the way he is viewed by the novelist. The crimes central to these narratives epitomize the vast gap between those who can aspire to the so-called "American dream" and those with no realistic chance of achieving it.

What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

2021-06-15 True Crime

Author : Katherine Dykstra
Release : 2021-06-15
Genre : True Crime
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 991/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood by : Katherine Dykstra

Download or read book What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood written by Katherine Dykstra. This book was released on 2021-06-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.

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Deconstructing True Crime Literature

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