Publisher description

Confronting murder in the newspaper, on screen, and in sensational trials, we often feel the killer is fundamentally incomprehensible and morally alien. But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports. The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that view, the Gothic imagination--with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime--seized upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration, and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance. The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.

Tiergarten is Berlin's oldest park, with more than five hundred acres of woodland in the heart of the city. Before it was absorbed by the city, the area that became Tiergarten was a naturally occurring forest. Throughout its history, it was used as royal hunting grounds and as a landscaped public park, and--in the years of hardship following World War II-- an area where trees were felled for firewood, before changing social and political circumstances and the growing ecological movement led to measures to restore and replant the vast public space. Thus, Tiergarten has become not only a very popular place of recreation but as well a biotope of extraordinarily high biodiversity. Generously illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression takes readers through the history of the park, with an eye toward exploring it as a radical spatial expression--a space where humans and other species and conflicting histories coexist in close proximity, and a model for future environments in areas of intense urbanization. Born of a recent symposium staged by the Technische Universit t Berlin, the book brings together twelve essays with a range of archival documents, including newspaper articles, maps, reports, plans, and photographs.

This collection proceeds chronologically, from poetry and short stories written in Buñuel's youth in Spain to an essay written in 1980, not long before his death.

Traditional cultural practices involving animals are being seriously questioned, heavily regulated, and, in some cases, even abolished in Spain. This essential and timely text brings together prominent scholars working in the ever-expanding field of animal studies in Spain, drawing from a variety of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to provide an interdisciplinary look at the animal question. In choosing an angle to approach the study of ethical, aesthetic considerations, and cultural representations of animals, this collection moves away from the ideology of human exceptionalism that is still predominant but progressively losing force in the field of animal ethics in Spain. It instead includes contributions by scholars who have chosen to look at animals, to a lesser or greater degree, through an antispeciesist lens, displaying the committed attention to and respect for animal life that characterizes critical animal studies.