In the Twilight of Good and Evil: Cesare Lombroso and the Criminological Imagination

The 18th and the 19th century saw both the rise of the sciences on crime and the rise of gothic literature. In this book Per Jørgen Ystehede examines the relationship between the work of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) and the rise of the gothic imagination. Furthermore, addresses the question of how to understand the relationship between the gothic tradition and contemporary critical criminological perspectives, as mediated through the discussion of Lombroso's thought and its influence on the discipline of criminology. Through a reading of Cesare Lombroso's The Anarchists (Gli Anarchici), Ystehede discusses Lombroso's views on the born criminal, on revolution, anarchism, political revolutionaries and the criminal through passion. This study offers both a new interpreataion of Lombroso's work on anarchism, as well as provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle spiritualist research in relation to the development of the science of criminology.