Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives

ISBN-13: 9780415872294 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 208 str.

Christiana Gregoriou

Opis

In this book, Gregoriou explores the portrayal of the serial killer identity and its related ideology across a range of contemporary crime narratives, including detective fiction, the true crime genre and media journalism. How exactly is the serial killer consciousness portrayed, how is the killing linguistically justified, and how distinguishing is the language revolving around criminal ideology and identity across these narrative genres? By employing linguistic and content-related methods of analysis, her study aims to work toward the development of a stylistic framework on the representation of serial killer ideology across factual (i.e. media texts), factional (i.e. true crime books) and fictional (i.e. novels) murder narratives. By analyzing serial murder narratives across various genres, Gregoriou uncovers a widely shared ‘group schema’ for these murderers, and questions the extent to which real criminal minds are in fact linguistically fictionalized. This study of the mental functioning and representation of criminal personas will illuminate our schematic understanding of actual criminal minds.

Spis treści

1. Crime Scenes  2. Killer Headlines  3. True Crime!  4. Buying Crime  5. The Verdict

O autorze

Christiana Gregoriou is a lecturer in English Stylistics at the University of Leeds. She has an interest in the linguistic make-up of literary texts, and crime narratives in particular. She's published on the criminal mind style, a book on English Literary Stylistics and a monograph on Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction.