On Murder, Considered As One of the Fine Arts -

Thomas de Quincey

Oneworld Classics Ltd

2009

128 páginas

4h 16m

ISBN-10: 1847491332

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey's innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism and aesthetic judgements, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams. In addition to this essay's Swiftian exercise in irony, he investigated the Williams case further in a postscript, resulting in a dramatic suspense-filled narrative that prefigures Capote's "In Cold Blood" and the modern true-crime genre. De Quincey's seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Cauteloso, sem perder o humor

“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think very little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”
O autor trata de um dos piores traços do homem e o aborda brilhantemente sob uma perspectiva singular.