Framing the Serial Killer in Crime Fiction: A Corpus- Assisted Critical Stylistic Approach

This paper uses a combination of corpus-based and qualitative approaches toinvestigate the ‘framing’ of criminals in fiction on serial killers, particularly inthe works of the top-selling novelists Thomas Harris and James Patterson.These works feature detectives/psychologists and villains who tend to bepsychopathic men involved in criminal actions that range from kidnapping tomurder. Framing can be used to understand and explore how an entity isconstructed, communicated and shaped. It can be defined as ‘schemata’ orrepertoires of organized patterns of thinking which can be triggered by theframing devices presented in the text (Kitzinger, 2007). In this paper, I explorehow serial killers are framed linguistically using the analytical tools of criticalstylistics proposed by Jeffries (2010a). Using WordSmith5, the frequency ofwords related to ‘killers’ and ‘murder’ and the concordance lines of the namesof each serial killer used as node words, are all extracted and examined.Concordance lines, which present ‘the analyst with instances of a word orcluster in its immediate co-text’ (Baker et al., 2008: 279), are examinedqualitatively to identify linguistic patterns using critical stylistic tools –including, for example, naming and describing, equating and contrasting,assuming and implying, prioritizing, representing actions/ events/ states,modality choices and metaphor. This paper, to a large extent, shows that thesuggested corpus-assisted critical stylistic approach provides a comprehensivemodel for the study of the serial killers in the selected novels, and possibly, andmore generally, for the study of characters in fiction. Indeed, the mainachievement of this approach which involves a synergy of quantitative andqualitative methods is the provision of a more comprehensive and systematicanalysis of large amounts of data.