Crime is a political subject, but rarely do we scrutinize the immanent politics of our crime-related cultural works. Failing to recognize and critique the ways these works influence our perceptions of crime, we are disabled from developing our own political meanings for crime. After an introductory chapter which traces the history of crime in a rapidly modernizing America and also suggests a basic crime typology, this work explores three prototypical varieties of nineteenth-century cultural work--crime reporting, imagining and remembering. Journalists, editors and publishers reported on crime in popular broadsheets, pamphlets, the penny press, the National Police Gazette, and bourgeois and mass daily newspapers. Authors of fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard imagined crime in their stories and novels, and detective story and crime thriller genres subsequently stabilized. Police chiefs, detectives such as Allan Pinkerton, and a group of professional and purportedly respectable criminals remembered crime in their memoirs, crime-stopping kits and confessions. Reporting influenced imagining and remembering, and imagining and remembering influenced one another and reporting. But regardless of whether the three varieties are treated separately or in conjunction with one another, a consideration of the assorted crime-related works and genres illustrates that crime is not a simple social reality but rather is born of a dialectic between occurrence and perspective. During the years 1830-1900 frames for crime and the criminal--cognitive devices with distinctive modes of selection, presentation and accentuation--reflected and contributed to the changing social order. Strictly speaking, these frames never became "depoliticized." However, as the traditional broadsheets and pamphlets and then the aggressive cultural work of the antebellum years gave way to the generic and professionalized work of the Gilded Age and later, crime-related cultural work lost its critical perspective. It ceased actively linking crime and politics and drawing conclusions from the linkages. Even the memoirs of criminals revealed support for the modern social order and its dominant values of efficiency, organization and scientific objectivity. Criminal frames became and , for the most part, remain dangerously restricting.
Ph.D.
American studies
University of Michigan
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160400/1/8502908.pdf