Ruin Lust offers a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic, and perverse uses of ruins in art from the 17th century to the present day. This book, which accompanied a major Tate Britain exhibition, includes more than 100 works by artists such as J. M. W Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paul Nash, and Rachel Whiteread. Beginning in the midst of the craze that sent artists, writers, architects, and tourists in search of ruins and picturesque landscapes in the 18th century, it shows how ruins have continued to be a source of visual and emo­tional fascination at particular historical moments. Thoroughly illustrated, Ruin Lust explores how ruin has become a way of thinking about art itself and its connection to both the past and the future.

Charlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imagined, an escape from familial and social duties, and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hands of God and doctors alike. Andy Warhol was terrified by disease and by the idea of disease. Glenn Gould claimed a friendly pat on his shoulder had destroyed his ability to play piano. And we all know someone who has trawled the Internet in solitude, seeking to pinpoint the source of his or her fantastical symptoms. The Hypochondriacs is a book about fear and hope, illness and imagination, despair and creativity. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And, in an intimate investigation of those lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Through witty, entertaining, and often moving examinations of the lives of these eminent hypochondriacs—James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol—Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

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This book provides the first recent philosophical account of how ruins acquire aesthetic value. It draws on a variety of sources to explore modern ruins, the ruin tradition, and the phenomenon of “ruin porn.” It features an unusual and original combination of philosophical analysis, the author’s photography, and reviews of both new and historically influential case studies, including Richard Haag’s Gas Works Park, the ruins of Detroit, and remnants of the steel industry of Pennsylvania. Tanya Whitehouse shows how the users of ruins can become architects of a new order, transforming derelict sites into aesthetically significant places we should preserve.

This collection is the first book to comprehensively analyse the relatively new and under-researched phenomenon of ‘ruin porn’. Featuring a diverse collection of chapters, the authors in this work examine the relevance of contemporary ruin and its relationship to photography, media, architecture, culture, history, economics and politics. This work investigates the often ambiguous relationship that society has with contemporary ruins around the world, challenging the notions of authenticity that are frequently associated with images of decay. With case studies that discuss various places and topics, including Detroit, Chernobyl, Pitcairn Island, post-apocalyptic media, online communities and urban explorers, among many other topics, this collection illustrates the nuances of ruin porn that are fundamental to an understanding of humanity’s place in the overarching narrative of history.

This book explores the ways in which criminological methods can be imaginatively deployed and developed in a world increasingly characterized by the blurred nature of social reality. Whilst recognizing the importance of positivist approaches and research techniques, it advocates a commitment to understanding the ways in which those techniques can be used imaginatively, at times in combination with less conventional methods, discussing the questions concerning risk, ethics and access that arise as a result. Giving voice to cutting edge research practices both in terms of concepts and methods that shift the criminological focus towards the kind of imaginative work that comprised the foundations of the discipline, it calls into question the utility and credentials of mainstream work that fails to serve the discipline itself or the policy questions allied to it. A call not to 'give up on numbers' but also not to be defined by statistics and the methods that produce them, Liquid Criminology sheds light on a way of doing research for criminology that is not only creative but also critical. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, criminology and social policy with interests in research methods and design.