Edited by Richard Rogers

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 246p.

By Jonathan Beller

The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, 

London: Pluto Press, 2017. 225p.

By Sabine Binder

In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre’s feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a vibrant platform for social, cultural and ethical debates, exposing violence, misogyny and racism and shedding light on the problematics of law and justice for women faced with crime. Readership: All interested in crime fiction and its gender/racial political potential, its cultural relevance, its ethics and aesthetics, in South Africa and beyond.

Leiden, NETH: Brill. 2020. 252p.

By Mark Pizzato

From the Preface: Why do humans perform acts of violence for a watching audience? This book

explores the performance of violence in various cultures, from ancient human and animal sacrifices to modern sports and cinema, through psychoanalytic theories and theatrical paradigms. How is the sublimation of human sacrifice today, on sports fields and movie screens, like and unlike actual bloodshed in prior cultures? Does it create a current community of ritual belief in the divine powers of mythic heroes and demons? What effects might melodramatic violence have on a mass audience--with purely good and evil forces battling apocalyptically onscreen especially after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent "war on terrorism" in our new millennium? Is a fundamental catharsis of fear and desire, of terrorist paranoia and capitalist greed, still pos- sible today, through complex characters and tragic violence, involving our mass-media warriors and godlike stars?

NY. SUNY Press. 2005. 260p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Edited By Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender

From the cover: In eleven original studies by social scientists, this is the first volume to focus on television reality crime programming as a genre. Contributors address such questions as: why do these programs exist; what larger cultural meaning do they have; what effect do they have on audiences; and what do they indicate about crime and justice in the late twentieth century? Adaptable at both undergraduate and graduate levels, Entertaining Crime wil contribute to discussions of crime and the media, as well as crime in relation to other issues, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and fear of crime.

NY. Aldine De Gruyter. 1998. 208p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Felice D. Blake

Felice D. Blake’s Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature highlights the pervasive representations of intraracial deceptions, cruelties, and contempt in Black literature. Literary criticism has tended to focus on Black solidarity and the ways that a racially linked fate has compelled Black people to counter notions of Black inferiority with unified notions of community driven by political commitments to creative rehumanization and collective affirmation. Blake shows how fictional depictions of intraracial conflict perform necessary work within the Black community, raising questions about why racial unity is so often established from the top down and how loyalty to Blackness can be manipulated to reinforce deleterious forms of subordination to oppressive gender, sexual, and class norms.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2018. 182p,

By David John Brennan

In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their success, such Frankensteinian pursuits proved rife with consequence for the men. Doubts and questions plagued them: What does it mean to be a poet if your work is not your own? Who is best fit to lay claim to a parcel of poetic property that was collaboratively crafted and bequeathed to a fictitious Poet? How does one kill a Poet born of one’s own hand? Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation.

Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2016. 160p.

Edited by Gerardo Del Guercio

This collection offers six critical essays on the topic of psychology in Edgar Allan Poe. It came together as a response to a visible absence of this subject in recent scholarship. The volume presents Edgar Allan Poe as one of the pioneers in psychology, who often anticipated major theoretical trends and ideas in psychology in his incessant explorations of the relationship between behavior and the psyche. Scrutinizing serial killer narratives, obsessive narratives through Jungian unconscious, Lacanian Das Ding, doppelg angers, intersubjectivity, and the interrelationship between the material world and imaginative faculties, the essays reveal the richness and the complexity of Poe's work and its pertinence to contemporary culture.

 Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin,  2019. 168p.

By M. Michelle Robinson

Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and  the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre’s puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America.
 
The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction’s puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 265p.

By Gene. D. Phillips

From the Introduction: “….In sum, this book presents an in-depth discussion of several gangster films, some of which are familiar members of the gangster genre, like John: Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and some that deserve to be better known, for example, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters. That a few meaningful books on the gangster film have appeared throughout the years demonstrates the continued interest in the genre….in this volume, I include some overlooked crime movies that deserve more attention than they have received. In addition, I have interviewed film directors, as well as other artists and technicians, associated with the films I treat. I also focus on some more recent movies, along with some from the classic period. These later movies are reminders that the gangster genre is still with us and is not going away.

NY. Rowman & Littlefield. 2014. 204p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Fran Mason

From the preface: “The film gangster, therefore, represents a seminal figure in the history of twentieth-century culture, forming the focus for a range of tensions that have dominated the discourses of industrialised society. These range from the role of the individual within an increasingly rationalised society, the impact of urban space (and its association with the fracturing discourses of modernity and postmodernity), the tension between tradition and the modern, the opposition between labour and pleasure, and particularly the relationship between ideology and freedom.

NY. Palgrave Macmillan. 2002. 203p. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

By Herman Melville

From Wikipedia: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whalethat bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself,[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".[2] Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.[3]

London. Richard Bentley . 1851. 632p.

By Anthony Trollope

From Wikipedia: The Way We Live Now is a satirical novel by Anthony Trollope, published in London in 1875 after first appearing in serialised form. It is one of the last significant Victorian novels to have been published in monthly parts. The novel is Trollope's longest, comprising 100 chapters, and is particularly rich in sub-plot. It was inspired by the financial scandals of the early 1870s; Trollope had just returned to England from abroad, and was appalled by the greed and dishonesty those scandals exposed. This novel was his rebuke. It dramatised how such greed and dishonesty pervaded the commercial, political, moral, and intellectual life of that era.

London Chapman and Hall. 1875. 1080p.

By Anthony Trollope

From Wikipedia: When neither the Whigs nor the Tories are able to form a government on their own, a fragile compromise coalition government is formed, with Plantagenet Palliser, the wealthy and hard-working Duke of Omnium, installed as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Duchess, formerly Lady Glencora Palliser, attempts to support her husband by hosting lavish parties at Gatherum Castle in Barsetshire, the family's largest country house, barely used until now. Palliser, initially unsure that he is fit to lead, grows to enjoy his high office, but becomes increasingly distressed when his government proves to be too weak and divided to accomplish anything. His own inflexible nature does not help.

London. Chapman & Hall. 1876. 807p.

By Anthony Trollope

Fron Wikipedia: “Phineas Finn is a novel by Anthony Trollope and the name of its leading character. The novel was first published as a monthly serial from October 1867 to May 1868 in St Paul's Magazine.[1] It is the second of the "Palliser" series of novels. Its sequel, Phineas Redux, is the fourth novel in the series. The character of Phineas Finn is said to have been partly inspired by Sir John Pope Hennessy (grandfather of the museum director of the same name),[2] a Roman Catholic from Cork, who was elected as an "Irish Nationalist Conservative" Member of Parliament for King's County in 1859.[3] It deals with both British parliamentary politics of the 1860s, including voting reform (secret ballot and eliminating rotten boroughs and Irish tenant-right) and Finn's romances with women of fortune, which would secure his financial future.

London. George Virtue. 1869. 751p.

By Anthony Trollope

Barchester Towers is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longmans in 1857. It is the second book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, preceded by The Warden and followed by Doctor Thorne. Among other things it satirises the antipathy in the Church of England between High Church and Evangelicaladherents. Trollope began writing this book in 1855. He wrote constantly and made himself a writing-desk so he could continue writing while travelling by train. "Pray know that when a man begins writing a book he never gives over", he wrote in a letter during this period. "The evil with which he is beset is as inveterate as drinking – as exciting as gambling". In his autobiography, Trollope observed "In the writing of Barchester Towers I took great delight. The bishop and Mrs. Proudie were very real to me, as were also the troubles of the archdeacon and the loves of Mr. Slope". When he submitted his finished work, his publisher, William Longman, initially turned it down, finding much of it to be full of "vulgarity and exaggeration".[1

London. Longmans. 1857. 559p.

By Mark Twain

From Wikipedia: The Prince and the Pauper is a novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada, before its 1882 publication in the United States.[1] The novel represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. Set in 1547, it tells the story of two young boys who were born on the same day and are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive, alcoholic father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Edward VI of England, son of Henry VIII of England. Plot: Tom Canty, the youngest son of a very poor family living in Offal Court located in London, has been abused by his father and grandmother, but is encouraged by the local priest, who taught him to read and write. Loitering around the palace gates one day, he sees Edward Tudor, the Prince of Wales. Coming too close in his intense excitement, Tom is caught and nearly beaten by the Royal Guards. However, Edward stops them and invites Tom into his palace chamber. There, the two boys get to know one another and are fascinated by each other's life. They have an uncanny resemblance to each other and learn they were even born on the same day, so they decide to swap clothes “temporarily". The Prince hides an item, which the reader later learns……

By Mark Twain

From Wikipedia: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.

Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The book is noted for "changing the course of children's literature" in the United States for the "deeply felt portrayal of boyhood".[2][better source needed] It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southernantebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism and freedom. Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language and racial epithet. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist,[3][4] criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger".

USA. Chatto & Windus / Charles L. Webster And Company.. 1884. 440p.

By Mark Twain

From Wikipedia: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy.[2] In the novel, Tom Sawyerhas several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best selling of Twain's works during his lifetime.[3][4]Though overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature.[5] It was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter.

Tom Sawyer is an orphan who lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, sometime in the 1840s. A fun-loving boy, he frequently skips school to play or go swimming. When Aunt Polly catches him sneaking home late on a Friday evening and discovers that he has been in a fight, she makes him whitewash her fence the next day as punishment….

Hartford. Conn. American Publishing Company. 1884. 392p.

By Franz Kafka. Translated by David Wyllie

From Wikipedia: The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] previously Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative.[2] Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castleand Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.

After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937.[3] In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

Berlin. Verlag Die Schmiede. 1925. 213p. CONTAINS MARK-UP