The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel

The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel examines the psychopath as a new kind of monster. Frederick Whiting reads novels – ranging from pulp fiction to belles lettres – that draw on science, law, and popular journalism to try to explain this threatening new creature. Through these readings, this book uncovers the ways in which the figure of the psychopath that populated so many twentieth-century American novels expressed cultural anxieties about sexuality, race, gender, and class – even as the psychopath marked the shifting boundaries of the category of 'the human.' Whiting offers an interdisciplinary analysis showing how literature, science, law, and popular journalism inform each other. Ultimately, he concludes, this episode in the genealogy of monstrosity amounts to a transformation in the evolving concept of the monstrous itself – from a violation of our nature to a violation of our narratives.