Focusing on the sexualized violence of Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy – including the novels, Swedish film adaptations, and Hollywood blockbusters – this collection of essays puts Larsson's work into dialogue with Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels by writers including Jo Nesbø, Håkan Nesser, Mo Hayder and Val McDermid.

Focusing on the sexualized violence of Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy – including the novels, Swedish film adaptations, and Hollywood blockbusters – this collection of essays puts Larsson's work into dialogue with Scandinavian and Anglophone crime novels by writers including Jo Nesbø, Håkan Nesser, Mo Hayder and Val McDermid.

A fascinating survey of popular culture in Europe, from Celtic punk and British TV shows to Spanish fashion and Italian sports. From One Direction and Adele to Penelope Cruz and Alexander Skarsgard, many Europeans are becoming household names in the United States. This ready-reference guide covers international pop culture spanning music, literature, movies, television and radio, the Internet, sports, video games, and fashion, from the mid-20th century through the present day. The organization of the book—with entries arranged alphabetically within thematic chapters—allows readers to quickly find the topic they are seeking. Additionally, indexing allows for cross-cultural comparisons to be made between pop culture in Europe to that of the United States. An extensive chronology and lengthy introduction provide important contextual information, such as the United States' influence on movies, music, and the Internet; the effect of censorship on Internet and social media use; and the history of pop culture over the years. Topics feature key musicians, songs, books, actors and actresses, movies and television shows, popular websites, top athletes, games, clothing fads and designers, and much more.

This volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to and reflect collective fears and anxieties. Drawing upon the insights and expertise of an international array of scholars, the chapters within explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. They examine unseen structures and uncertain spaces, and simultaneously provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Christie, and iconic fictional figures, like Holmes, as well as underexplored subjects, including Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find new perspectives on crime writing employing theories of cultural memory and deep mapping.

This book discusses that the genre of crime fiction is suitable for the presentation of the crises, conflicts, and indeterminacies present in the plot of the selected works. This book exposes the darker side of Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden, as the writers and works selected for the book are based on Swedish society. Though as a matter of fact, Scandinavian countries are considered to be the most egalitarian and progressive welfare societies all over the world. The present book explores how popular culture may prove to be a significant thematic approach to studying Scandinavian crime fiction (also called Nordic Noir). The Swedish authors use popular culture as a tool through which they try to convey their concerns regarding various serious issues like anti-immigration, racism, xenophobia, violence against women, the violence of human rights, crimes like the drug trade, human trafficking, etc. By assigning the central place to Sjowall and Wahloo’s Roseanna (1965), The Laughing Policeman (1968), The Terrorists (1975), Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers (1991), Sidetracked (1995), The Fifth Women (1996), Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Girl who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007), this book enunciates the notion of popular culture and crime fiction genre in the propagation of the socio-critical reflections of life in the welfare state. Hence, this work also analyses the plot, characters, and themes in the aforementioned works to locate the elements of popular fiction in Scandinavian crime novels by representing this genre’s ubiquitousness in the twenty-first century.

Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis explores psychological disorder as common to the human condition using a unique three-angled approach: psychoanalysis recognises the inherent suffering encountered by each subject due to developmental phases; psychology applies specific categorisation to how this suffering manifests; cinema depicts suffering through a combination of video and aural elements. Functioning as a culturally reflexive medium, the six feature films analysed, including Black Swan (2010) and The Machinist (2004), represent some of the most common psychological disorders and lived experiences of the contemporary era. This book enters unchartered terrain in cinema scholarship by combining clinical psychology's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Five (DSM-V) to organise and diagnose each character, and psychoanalysis to track the origin, mechanism and affect of the psychological disorder within the narrative trajectory of each film. Lacan's theories on the infantile mirror phase, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, Žižek's theories on the Real, the big Other and the Event, and Kristeva's theories on abjection and melancholia work in combination with the DSM's classification of symptoms to interpret six contemporary pieces of cinema. By taking into consideration that origin, mechanism, affect and symptomatology are part of an interconnected group, this book explores psychological disorder as part of the human condition, something which contributes to and informs personal identity. More specifically, this research refutes the notion that psychological disorder and psychological health exist as a binary, instead recognising that what has traditionally been pathologised, may instead be viewed as variations on human identity.

Marxist theories have had a profound influence on crime fiction, beginning with the works of the American writers of the 1930s. This study explores the development of a Swedish Marxist noir subgenre after the 1990s through a Marxist reading of central works, from the Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler to the 1960s social crime fiction of Sjowall-Wahloo to modern bestselling authors such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Roslund & Hellstrom, Jens Lapidus, Arne Dahl and others. The works of these writers show a common thread of Marxist worldview in their portrayal of a modern world gone wrong.