WINNER - BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015, Jack the Ripper Conference, Nottingham, England. Will Jack the Ripper ever be identified? The answer is an emphatic "No." But not because he was a quasi-supernatural entity able to perform lightning-fast kerb-side surgery whilst running split-second rings around two London police forces. Jack the Ripper did not exist - except within the minds of his creators and those who for one reason or another have attempted for over one hundred years to turn the myth into a reality. In 1976 Simon Daryl Wood revealed Stephen Knight's hugely popular Royal Conspiracy to be a farrago of nonsense, and since then has written extensively on the Whitechapel Murders. "Deconstructing Jack: The Secret History of the Whitechapel Murders," the result of over twenty years' research, casts a sceptical eye over the continuous stream of lies, invention, misinformation, self-publicity and opportunism which has kept this Victorian bogeyman alive in the darkest reaches of our 21st Century imaginations. Can history ever bring itself to shrug off almost 130 years of dogma and cherished beliefs, and at last smile ruefully at having been suckered in probably the greatest shell game of all time? Or will this heretical challenge to orthodoxy be peremptorily dismissed as revisionist nonsense, thus allowing the time-old parlour game of Pin the Tail on the Ripper to continue ad infinitum? Read the book and judge for yourself.

The first book-length study to address Moore’s significance to the Gothic, this volume is also the first to provide in-depth analyses of his spoken-word performances, poetry and prose, as well as his comics and graphic novels. The essays collected here identify the Gothic tradition as perhaps the most significant cultural context for understanding Moore’s work, providing unique insight into its wider social and political dimensions as well as addressing key theoretical issues in Gothic Studies, Comics Studies and Adaptation Studies. Scholars, students and general readers alike will find fresh insights into Moore’s use of horror and terror, homage and parody, plus allusion and adaptation. The international list of contributors includes leading researchers in the field and the studies presented here enhance the understanding of Moore’s works while at the same time exploring the ways in which these serve to advance a broader appreciation of Gothic aesthetics.

Media and Violence pays equal attention to the production, content and reception involved in any representation of violence. This book offers a framework for understanding how violence is represented and consumed. It examines the relationship of media, gender, and real-world violence; representations of violence in screen entertainment; the effects of violent media on consumers; the ethics and gender politics of the production processes of screen violence; and the discussions are illustrated with topical and well-known examples, enabling the reader to critically engage with the debates.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. The murderer was never caught, yet film and television depicts a killer with a recognisable costume, motive and persona. This book examines the origins of the screen presentation of the four key elements associated with the murders – Jack the Ripper, the victims, the detective and Whitechapel. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

This book is about relating the concepts of rape and murder in both senses of the term; that is the way rape and murder are linked and related and also how stories of rape and murder are related or told.

After 125 years of theorizing and speculation regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper, Russell Edwards is in the unique position of owning the first physical evidence relating to the crimes to have emerged since 1888. This evidence is from one of the crime scenes, and has now been rigorously examined by some of the most highly-qualified forensic scientists in the country who have ascertained its true provenance. With the help of modern forensic techniques, Russell's ground-breaking discoveries provide conclusive answers to many of the most challenging mysterious surrounding the case.

Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: · Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities · The cultural politics of victims rights · Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora · Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age.

On the night of April 7, 2006, eight members of the motorcycle gang the Bandidos were killed execution style and left in a farmer's field near London, Ontario. The brutal slaying, the largest mass killing in Canada's history, was reported as the work of a rival motorcycle gang. The Shedden Massacre instantly made international headlines, as did the sensational murder trial that followed. In Bloody Justice, readers are taken to the very night of the crime itself, to the key players and perpetrators, to the events leading to the slayings—and inside a trial that let a killer go free. Reflecting the author's painstaking research, attendance at the trials, and jailhouse interviews with one of the convicted, Bloody Justice outlines a fascinating case that is very much at odds with the prosecution's.

This collection of essays displays the range and breadth of Hitchcock scholarship and assesses the significance of his body of work as a bridge between the fin de siecle culture of the 19th century and the 20th century. It engages with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations.