ABSTRACT
The prologue sets the stage and presents the ways in which, following the French Revolution, the image of murder became a central trope in modern culture. In the English fin de siècle, a time of political and social turmoil, many dreamt dreams of aesthetic and cultural revolutions as well. The late nineteenth century, it is demonstrated, soon became a battleground for contesting ideas on how modern murder should be represented, and many contemporaries read murder as a metaphor for conscious cultural transformations. The prologue goes on to present the three key questions the book tackles: the first, why was murder such a central trope in the turn of the century discourse on modern art and culture, and what cultural purposes did this image serve? The second is what alleged traditional murder depictions contemporaries sought to eliminate, or believed others strove to eliminate, and the third is what were the quintessentially modern depictions of murder contemporaries longed to create and consume?
