ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the promise of literature for the discipline of criminology, as well as the potential of the criminological imagination as a quality of mind, an analytic framework and a method of knowledge-production. It relevances to criminology because it encourages a more creative and reflexive consideration of criminology, its objects of study and its methods. Although Native Son was selected due to its critical acclaim and public popularity, its relevant criminological themes of violence and racism, its enduring nature and its ability to stimulate criminological thought and debate. In a broader sense, the chapter devotes to issues of methodology and epistemology. It demonstrates that a criminological imagination based on his work in fact provides an ideal meta-framework with which to consider fiction and fictional realities. The chapter concludes the benefits of a criminology that is imaginatively inclusive.
