This book deals with the exposing of various impostors and hoaxes. One of Bram Stoker's last works, it is a survey of various charlatans, rogues, and other practitioners of make-believe. With a cheerfully withering eye for their cons, Stoker introduces us to many famous fakers including: royal pretenders (such as Perkin Warbeck, who claimed King Henry VII's throne), the Wandering Jew, John Law, Arthur Orton, women masquerading as men, hoaxers, Chevalier D'eon, the Bisley Boys, and others.
Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: · Teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities · The cultural politics of victims rights · Discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora · Terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age.
"A career in the Victorian penal system might not seem to be a source of excitement or even great interest, but for John Buckley Castieau it was the trigger for nearly three decades of diaries that reveal not only what went on behind prison walls but also much about the colony's early history. J.B. Castieau was the governor of both Beechworth and Melbourne gaols as well as, somewhat disastrously, the Inspector-General of Penal Establisments."--Page 4 of cover.