Overview
- Offers a perspective on the growing trend of criminals as heroes in popular media
- Examines the current cultural “fascination” with criminals and its broader societal implications
- Expands beyond the limited scope of the western to address pirates, gentleman highwaymen, and “bad gender.”
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About this book
This book delves into humanity’s compulsive need to valorize criminals. The criminal hero is a seductive figure, and audiences get a rather scopophilic pleasure in watching people behave badly. This book offers an analysis of the varied and vexing definitions of hero, criminal, and criminal heroes both historically and culturally.
This book also examines the global presence, gendered complications, and gentle juxtapositions in criminal hero figures such as: Robin Hood, Breaking Bad, American Gods, American Vandal, Kabir, Plunkett and Macleane, Martha Stewart, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Eleven, and Let The Bullets Fly.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Roxie J. James, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. She specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature, and her research interests include British women's writing and depictions of dirt in Victorian literature and culture.
Kathryn E. Lane, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English and Department Chairperson at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, popular culture, and feminist theory. She is the editor of the 2018 book collection Age of the Geek: Depictions of Nerds and Geeks in Popular Media.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture
Editors: Roxie J. James, Kathryn E. Lane
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39585-8
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-39584-1Published: 08 March 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-39587-2Published: 08 March 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-39585-8Published: 07 March 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 177
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 6 illustrations in colour
Topics: Global Cinema and TV, Global/International Culture, Crime and the Media