Stalking

Reviews / Votes

Stalking, as a criminal offence and as an obsessive psychological state, has only recently been identified but it has a long and vivid history in literature and film from the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone in Dickens&#39s Our Mutual Friend to Alex Forrest, the bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction. A fascinating mix of psychology, film studies, literature and cultural theory. * <i>The Times</i> * Its a new name for an old crime, and Nicol spends some illuminating portions of the book away from modern stalkers, slasher films and their inverted rom-com fellows, to dig into the 19th century. Particularly intriguing is his identification of a line of inheritance from the Baudelairean flaneur, to Poe&#39s prototypical detective, to the modern-day stalker: all creatures of the crowd, and of the modern metropolis, which enforce a combination of anonymity and intimacy, grist to the stalker&#39s mill. City of Glass, indeed. * <i>The Guardian</i> * Historians define us by our obsessions, and if Bran Nicol is right, these troubled times will be known as the Age of Stalking. It doesnt quite compare with the Age of Enlightenment, alas. But then the narcissistic attitude Nicol targets in this short, sharp analysis of our deviant cultural psychology isn&#39t much interested in the old profundities. Though a self-absorbed distortion of love is hardly new . . . Nicol builds a strong case that our era has aided and abetted a peculiar obsession to the point where it is accepted as an everyday phenomenon. * <i>Globe and Mail</i>, Toronto * Nicol offers a fascinating analysis of one our epoch&#39s most ubiquitous and fascinating facets. What is clear is that regardless of how much we may speak of the phenomenon, and how ubiquitous a phenomenon we may think it, stalking is more ingrained in our culture than we think it, or wish it, to be. * <i>Culture Wars</i> * While stalkers have been around for centuries, it wasn&#39t until the 1990s that the act was defined, pathologised and criminalised. Stalking is an illuminating study of why stalking became prominent at this time and the role culture has played in feeding this phenomenon. The rise of stalking, Bran Nicol suggests, is the product of a postmodern world rife with mixed messages about what constitutes acceptable behaviour. * <i>The Age</i>, Melbourne * To read an article on stalking by Bran Nicol in US on-line magazine American Sexualities please click here * Quote *