Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into "monsters" and "monster-talk," and law and crime. "Monsters" may refer to allegorical or symbolic fantastic beings (as in literature, film, legends, myths, etc.), or actual or real life monsters, as well as the interplay/ambiguity between the two general types of "monsters." This edited collection thus explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving fronts of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime, and may be seen as extensions of a Gothic Criminology, generally construed. Gothic Criminology refers to a theoretical framework initially developed by Caroline Joan "Kay" S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Succinctly paraphrased, noting the proliferation of Gothic modes of narration and visualization in American popular culture, academia and even public policy, Picart and Greek proposed a framework, which they described as a "Gothic Criminology" to attempt to analyze the fertile lacunae connecting the "real" and the "reel" in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses.
Introduction: Explorations in Gothic Criminology: Ruminating on Monsters, Law, and Crime - Caroline "Kay" Joan S. Picart I. Of Myths and Monsters Chapter One: "Deeds of Treachery and Violence and Lust and Cruelty": Revisiting Freud's Primal Crimes in Aboriginal Central Australia - John Morton Chapter Two: Criminal Anthropology, Fabulism, and Criminology's Unacknowledged Teratological Lineage - Jon Frauley Chapter Three: Vampire Fictions and the Conflation of Violent Criminality with Real Vampirism: A Practical Overview - John Edgar Browning and DJ Williams II. Contagion, Monstrosity, Ethics Chapter Four: A Double-Tap "Lilith Moral Panic" in Israel, 2014: How Labeling Others as "Monsters" Conceals Their Victimization - Orit Kamir Chapter Five: Evil-By-Proxy and Everyday Monsters: Towards a Moral Sociology for Overcoming the Passive Observation of Evil -Michael Hviid Jacobsen Chapter Six: Monstering Madness: Criminal Lunatics in Broadmoor 1863-1913- Lucy Williams, Sandra Walklate, and Barry Godfrey III. Monsters in Reel/Real Life Chapter Seven: The Purge, or Law of the Universal Monstrous - Matthew Sorrento Chapter Eight: Contrasting Depictions of Medical Serial Killers; Doctors Petiot and Shipman from the Manic to the Mundane - Steve Greenfield Chapter Nine: The Redactasaurus Chronicles: Fear, Consumption and Graffiti in Capital City - Deborah Landry IV. Law, War and Monstrous Discourses Chapter Ten: Human Trafficking, Empathy for Victims, the Tool of Eradication -David "D.W." Duke Chapter Eleven: Visualizing Monsters and Just Wars in Legal and Public Analyses of Eastwood's American Sniper - Marouf Hasian Jr. Chapter Twelve: Monstrous Discourses, Jihadi Cool, and Emergent Counter-Terrorist Narratives: The Case of Ahmad Khan Rahami (a.k.a. Ahmad Rahimi) and the 2016 New York/New Jersey Bombings - Caroline Joan "Kay" S. Picart Postscript: Gothic Criminology's Evolving Frontiers - Cecil Greek
