What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations of crime and policing—moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Reproduction of the original.

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.

In this revolutionary work, John Dominic Crossan reveals that the Passion and Resurrection Narratives in the four canonical Gospels are radical revisions of an earlier Gospel account. He argues boldly that the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, discovered in the grave of a Christian monk in Egypt circa 1886, contains the earliest version of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He describes how the authors of the four Gospels revised the early account of how their revision predominated as Roman authority grew. Lacking in the revision, he suggests, is the very heart of the earlier Passion: its depiction of Jesus' death as the consummation of Israel's pain and the resurrection as the vindication of Israel's faith.

Contains primary texts relating to the British slave trade in the 17th and 18th century. The first volume contains two 18th-century texts covering the slave trade in Africa. Volume two focuses on the work of the Royal African company, and volumes three and four focus on the abolitionists' struggle.