Immagini e criminalità nell’Italia di fine secolo tra stampa, letteratura e scienza

ABSTRACT This article investigates the dissemination of the criminal image in fin-de-siècle Italy within three different discursive areas – crime news, the popular novel, and criminological science – with a view to unveiling the complex, and often contradictory, role played by visual culture in the re-elaboration and popularisation of ideas, concepts and perceptions concerned with crime and its ambiguous nature. The image, as I intend to show, complicates and subverts traditional interpretations regarding the contribution made by crime literature and the popular press to the reconfiguration of the very idea of delinquency and to the identification of new instruments to understand it and control it. This article ultimately provides a much more complex and nuanced scenario than generally acknowledged by scholars that necessarily invites further analysis.