• "Images of crime and lawlessness have long dominated American
culture across the lines of virtually all media forms. Not only
does Rachel Hall's Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture
fill a distinct gap in scholarly literature on crime and visual
culture, it is a provocative and important contribution to cultural
studies of crime." -- Carol Stabile, University of Oregon, author
of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender and Race in U.S.
Crime News
|
Wanted:
The Outlaw in American Visual Culture |
| |
| Rachel Hall |
| 192 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 26 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2855-5 • $49.50 |
| Paper ISBN 978-0-8139-2856-2 • $19.50 |
| Cultural
Frames, Framing Culture
|
| November 2009 |
 |
Assembling a rich archive of images and texts from the eighteenth
century to the present, Rachel Hall offers a history of the "wanted"
poster, examining its uses, patterns of circulation, and formal
development as an iconic print genre. Her narrative covers a wide
range of images: execution broadsides, runaway slave notices,
private detective posters, FBI posters, artists' approximations,
and the depiction of key figures in the "war on terror."
Hall's cultural analysis has profound implications for our understanding
of contemporary American fantasies of vulnerability, projection
of enemies around the world, and adoption of security measures
in domestic and foreign policy.
Wanted will appeal not only to students and scholars in
literary studies, cultural studies, and art history but also to
readers more generally interested in society's outlaws and in
the test of wills between law enforcement and criminal evasion.
Rachel Hall is Assistant Professor
in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University.
|
