The present study investigates how prison comes across as a culturally constructed imaginary. Drawing on narratological methodologies, the study discusses prison as simultaneously real and imagined in society’s ongoing communication with and about itself. Through an investigation of how prison is presented in autobiographical prison literature, the study shows how culturally held fears of imprisonment surface in terms of abjection and uncanniness. Previous prison studies have discussed this in terms of civil death and subsequent resurrection. Unlike previous studies, the present study employs the monstrous-feminine motif as a critical device in order to redefine the understanding of prison as abject and uncanny in patriarchal societies. An implementation of the monstrous-feminine motif enables a reading of the prison’s particular form of punishment as one that entails incorporation and assimilation; rather than operating on a patriarchal principle of exclusion.

Culturally constructed ideals and stereotypes are part of collective sense-making processes. One such stereotype is Nils Christie's ideal victim. The present study discusses how the ideal victim shares key features with another cultural stereotype: the damsel in distress. Moreover, the study addresses attempts at subverting such stereotypes, which can be found in the women avengers of rape-revenge narratives. Studies of rape-revenge narratives have elucidated how such stories (re)imagine rape victimhood and survival in Western and Nordic culture, in ways that question the ideal victim qua damsel and her underlying patriarchal ideologies from a feminist perspective. However, such critique has led to the creation of other stereotypes and ideologically complex and even problematic portrayals of rape and victimization. Through a semiotic analysis of portrayals of a popular rape-revenge protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, the present study discusses how different ideologies surface, converse, and collide in fictional narratives of rape, survival, victimhood, revenge, and retribution. The study finds that while embodying resistance to the damsel, Lisbeth Salander also embodies aspects of the patriarchal ideologies that keep the damsel in place, thus creating an ideologically complex image. This creates a space for questioning the cultural understanding of rape, victimhood, and resistance.

The aim of the investigation is to show that Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a novel centred on a conflict between feeling understood as represented sentiment and feeling understood as affective immanence. The study uses a phenomenological approach that stands in alignment with Michel Henry’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of transcendence. Attention is drawn to the enmity in Mansfield Park between sensibility’s sentiments and affectivity’s raw feelings. It is suggested that this tension runs through Mansfield Park as an opposition central to its inner structure. It is shown that Fanny Price and Henry Crawford are incompatible on affective rather than moral grounds, and that the focus of the novel is not primarily on the behaviour of characters but on the nature of feeling itself. Mr. Crawford cultivates feeling as something that can be conveniently represented in the world as a world-phenomenon among other world-phenomena, whereas the heroine resists that very understanding of feeling and life. The study delineates the heroine’s struggle against the archetypal man of sentiments not as a prudish struggle against unrestrained erotic passion but as a struggle against a social apparatus for disfiguring the reality of feeling. The essay highlights segments of the literary text that point to a difference between feeling as an interplay of emotions monitored by reason, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, feeling as something with an inner source that is deep and reclusive, withdrawn from the light of the world and from the representational forces of social life. 

In terms of time as well as in terms of depth, prison is a storied institution. Many-layered tales have been told about it since its inception. A prominent theme of these stories is how they configure belonging and otherness through horror-iconography. This study pursues how prison is made sense of in stories that present it as both fact and fiction. To study this, it explores how prison is narrativized in 10 commercially published prison autobiographies. The analysis explores how the narrativization of prison space speaks to social fears and anxieties about deviance and punishment, and how these narratives fit into social, subject-formative processes where prison is an abject as well as uncanny institution.

The study employs haunting and the monstrous-feminine as critical devices. The implementation of the monstrous-feminine motif enables a reading of the prison’s particular form of punishment as one that threatens to devour, incorporate, and assimilate subjects into the other; rather than exclude and remove (undesirable) subjects from society. It also elucidates how, as an abject other, it cannot spawn clean and proper, rehabilitated bodies. Moreover, viewing prison as haunting unveils several processes that unfamiliarize the familiar in both conceptual and spatiotemporal ways. It shows how prison unsettles definitions and meanings of things like past, present, and future; punisher and punishee; and even life and death. Additionally, focusing on haunting as social, spatial, and temporal ambiguity enables an analysis of how prison functions as a repository of repressed violence. This is particularly evident when texts reveal how prison is haunted at the same time as it also haunts places and people both in and around it. Uncanny doubles exemplify this, where eerily similar bodies and places destabilize notions of safety and danger. 

Through its analysis of prison novels, the present study unveils how prison is narrativized as a viscous timespace that devours, disorients, and dissolves. It threatens to incorporate both subjects and other spaces into its lingering abjectivity, and haunt them if they ever leave. The study analyses how prison inscribes social fears on flesh, as well as what ghosts this flesh-making conjures. The resulting view is one of a sticky, subject-dissolving prison that seeps into and disrupts the fabric of ordinary life, while also threatening to keep growing and devouring with indiscriminate insatiability.

Although desistance is increasingly recognized as a series of complex processes by which individuals transform from offenders into nonoffenders, few desistance scholars have studied this process in depth. In recent years, however, some have begun to explore how desistance is a process rife with setbacks and struggles. Through an analysis of repeated in-depth interviews with ten desisting women, in this study, we have found such struggles to be unsettling and outright frightening. Examples of this were prevalent throughout the women's narratives. The results of our analysis show how frightening aspects of desistance processes stem from making an unfamiliar, normative lifestyle familiar, while unfamiliarizing oneself with a familiar, deviant lifestyle. As such, desistance processes can be conceptualized as uncanny, that is, as pertaining to the frightening and uncertain. Although uncanniness is not a theoretical framework one tends to find in desistance research, it has the potential to develop the understanding of the struggles, fears, and anxieties of desistance processes. Through our analysis, we engage with how uncanniness can nuance established concepts in desistance research. Implications for theory as well as for criminal justice practice are discussed.