[CRIMINOCORPUS] publication

Vient de paraître:

Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal:The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860-1918, Oxford: Bardwell
Press, 2006.  304p. ISBN : 0-9548683-1-5.

Voici le texte de la quatrième de couverture:

Tracing the Criminal recounts the history of the emergence of ‘scientific’
criminology in Britain during the period 1860-1918. It shows how it developed
from the prevalent view that criminals constituted a sub-category of the Human
Race who differed from the law-abiding majority in other ways than simply by
their lawbreaking, and that those differences were accessible to scientific
investigation.

As a result, the criminal was increasingly seen as a genetic
threat to the wider population. Neil Davie’s perceptive study explores the ideas
and research of this era and examines the impact of the influential theories of
Lombroso, Galton, Goring and others. As Professor Davie makes clear, the new
inductive science of criminology sought not merely to describe criminals, but
also to explain them. What gripped the minds of a wide range of Victorians and
Edwardians was thus not simply a taxonomic desire to pin a label on ‘The
Criminal’ and place him or her under a bell jar, but the urge to explore the
very springs of crime itself.

L’introduction du livre (12 pages) est accessible en ligne sur le site de
l’éditeur: www.bardwell-press.co.uk.

Neil Davie

Département d’Etudes du Monde Anglophone,
Université Lumière Lyon 2.