Book review: The subject of murder: gender, exceptionality, and the modern killer

"The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer." Lisa Downing. University of Chicago Press. April 2013. --- In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Emma Smith finds an eloquently presented and well-researched range of case studies, charting the crimes, treatment of, and public responses to several murderers throughout history.