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society; a value and status ‘inscribed by culture and counterinscribed by individuals’ (DeMello 2000 : 9). Relatedly, this chapter provides an analysis of the marking, both literal and metaphorical, of nonhuman beings and women via an examination of contemporary crime narratives, including Jeffery Deaver’s novel The skin collector ( 2014b ) and Peter Robinson’s Abattoir blues published in 2014 . 1 In doing so, it links the exploitation and objectification of the bodies of women and of nonhumans. MARKING AND CONSUMPTION: WOMEN AND CRIME
Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851–1914, and around 1955 to the present). The collection reads tattoos and associated scarification, such as branding, as mimetic devices that mark and remark crime and detective narratives in complex ways. The chapters utilise a variety of critical perspectives drawn from posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies to read the tattoo as individual and community bodily narratives. The collection develops its focus from the first tattoo renaissance and considers the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. This book has a broad appeal and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars and, in particular, those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.
INTRODUCTION Although the Harry Potter series is traditionally positioned within the fantasy genre, it can also be read as a crime narrative with Harry as the ‘ultimate detective’ at its heart (Zipes 2002 : 179). Charles Elster argues that ‘Harry is a detective in the tradition of Philip Marlowe and Nancy Drew, and the series is more clearly in the mystery genre than the fantasy genre’ ( 2003 : 206). Certainly, Harry begins the series like Nancy Drew: an amateur investigator, uncovering secrets
This chapter considers the work of bestselling French author Caryl Férey, who uses tattoos both to drive the intrigue and to set the cultural scene in two New Zealand-based thrillers: Haka (1998) and Utu (2004). In the crime narrative, Férey simplifies contemporary Maori tattooing for his detectives – and his French readers – by having all members of a cannibalistic Maori sect sport the same moko (facial tattoo). In reality, each Maori’s moko is unique. In inking criminality on faces, Férey mines a crime fiction trope that harks back to Cesare Lombroso’s nineteenth-century theories of criminology which linked crime to inherited, often visible, characteristics. Although the presence of moko is not genetically determined, a biological link pertains through Maori ancestry. Using the moko as an indication of criminal culpability is read in this chapter as a powerful, yet simplistic, undercoded signifier, accessible for cultural outsider readers, but which forms a problematic cultural appropriation. As such, Férey offers cultural outsider readers a (false) sense that they possess privileged access to a code system otherwise restricted to initiated insiders. In doing so, his writing exemplifies a cultural re-writing of tattoos typical of neocolonial attitudes to indigenous peoples.
18 Mean streets, new lives: the representations of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish crime fiction David Clark One of the most interesting phenomena to appear in Irish literature since the late 1990s has been the rise of ‘homegrown’ crime fiction. Irish crime narrative has been strong, historically, as a sub-genre, but until the 1990s had largely been concerned with the representation of fictional crime in non-Irish settings, usually the US or the UK. Since the period immediately prior to the economic boom commonly known as the Celtic Tiger, however, a
so, we unite the spoken and written word in the term ‘remark’ to emphasise the tattoo as narrative: and so the tattoo speaks. This book is made up of fifteen original and scholarly chapters, which examine the tattoo and the practice of tattooing in crime and detective narratives from the mid-nineteenth century to the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary crime and detective narratives. Tattoos and crime narratives form a twin tradition: the rise of the tattoo industry and the literary tattoo is coterminous with the birth of detective
on or taking advantage of the popularity of the radical or Chartist narrative. I do not deny that popular literature can be conservative or liberal-reformist in its messages, that it also took pages out of conservative and liberal playbooks, but I am focused on the way it looked to narratives ‘from below’ (which in this case might be better said to be ‘from the side of’) to capture a bigger part of the market. To be clear, I do not read the penny blood, Newgate calendars and novels, or melodramatic crime narratives as inciting revolution or promoting the Charter
Tegelberg use the literary framework of noir crime narratives to approach their topic, making a connection between the ‘mean streets’ of hardboiled fiction and the ‘alley’ along the coast of Canada where Greenlandic icebergs collect, to consider ‘how the human conquest of nature appears as a form of slow violence in the Anthropocene noir’ (146). Within this literary framework, Lam and Tegelberg read iceberg sightseeing as a form of ‘dark tourism’: ‘melting icebergs are transformed into nonhuman death spectacles for sightseeing tourists … Couched in a narrative of purity
individualised body itself. This chapter therefore extends its analysis to both bodily tattoos and what might be called ‘urban patternings’, the increasing array of symbols and urban design that characterised the nineteenth-century metropolis. This chapter undertakes a detailed analysis of Poe’s short story, ‘The tell-tale heart’ (1843) and Herman Melville’s novel, Moby- Dick; Or, the whale (1851). 2 While the former is a crime narrative related by a murderer with reference to police detection, the enormity of Melville’s novel actually threatens to
Fletcher Christian’s daughter. In ‘The island, or Christian and his comrades’ (1823), Lord Byron utilised Bligh’s Narrative as one of his sources. The descendants of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island have appeared in short stories by Mark Twain, ‘The great revolution in Pitcairn’ (1882), and Jack London, ‘The seed of McCoy’ (1911). The Bounty has also inspired numerous works of popular fiction and children’s literature. The mutiny and the tattoos of the crew continue to provide material for crime narratives into the twenty-first century. Val McDermid’s crime fiction