Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth Century Discourse

by Marie-Christine Leps, Stanley Fish (Editor)

In this wide-ranging analysis, Marie-Christine Leps traces the production and circulation of knowledge about the criminal in nineteenth-century discourse, and shows how the delineation of deviance served to construct cultural norms. She demonstrates how the apprehension of crime and criminals was an important factor in the establishment of such key institutions as national systems of education, a cheap daily press, and various welfare measures designed to fight the spread of criminality.
Leps focuses on three discursive the emergence of criminology, the development of a mass-produced press, and the proliferation of crime fiction, in both England and France. Beginning where Foucault's work Discipline and Punish ends, Leps analyzes intertextual modes of knowledge production and shows how the elaboration of hegemonic truths about the criminal is related to the exercise of power.
The scope of her investigation includes scientific treatises such as Criminal Man by Cesare Lombroso and The English Convict by Charles Goring, reports on the Jack the Ripper murders in The Times and Le Petit Parisien , the Sherlock Holmes stories, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , and novels by Zola and Bourget.

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 1992

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much more Foucault than I wanted to read about. Obviously, it's my own fault for wanting to read a different book than the one Leps wanted to write, but I wanted way more specifics of the entanglements between criminology/newspapers/detective fiction in the 19th c. and way fewer charts about epistemology and enthymemes. (And I feel like most references I've seen to the book take away specifics about the creation of a category of 'criminal man' via these entwined, mutually-constitutive ways of knowledge production, and not so much her general points about critical theory blah blah.)