BiblioVault - Books about Victim

Blaming the Victim

How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty

Jairo Lugo-Ocando

Pluto Press, 2014

Poverty, it seems, is a constant in today's news, usually the result of famine, exclusion or conflict. In Blaming the Victim, Jairo Lugo-Ocando sets out to deconstruct and reconsider the variety of ways in which the global news media misrepresent and decontextualise the causes and consequences of poverty worldwide. The result is that the fundamental determinant of poverty - inequality - is removed from their accounts.

The books asks many biting questions. When - and how - does poverty become newsworthy? How does ideology come into play when determining the ways in which 'poverty' is constructed in newsrooms - and how do the resulting narratives frame the issue? And why do so many journalists and news editors tend to obscure the structural causes of poverty?

In analysing the processes of news production and presentation around the world, Lugo-Ocando reveals that the news-makers' agendas are often as problematic as the geopolitics they seek to represent. This groundbreaking study reframes the ways in which we can think and write about the enduring global injustice of poverty.

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Captain Jack Helm

A Victim of Texas Reconstruction Violence

Chuck Parsons

University of North Texas Press, 2018

Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media

Madelon Hoedt

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

Despite its necessary centrality within the genre, the concept of the victim has not received much direct attention within the field of horror studies. Arguably, their presence is so ubiquitous as to become invisible—the threat of horror implies the need for a victim, whose function never alters, often becoming a blank slate for audiences to project their desires and fears onto. This volume seeks to make explicit the concept of the victim within horror media and to examine their position in more detail, demonstrating that the necessity of their appearance within the genre does not equate to a simplicity of definition. The chapters within this volume cover a number of topics and approaches, examining sources from literature, film, TV, and games (both analogue and digital) to show the pervasiveness of horror’s victims, as well as the variety of their guises.

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Vengeance of the Victim

History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani’s Fiction

Marilyn Schneider

University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Vengeance of the Victim was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

More profoundly than any documentary record, the collected fiction of Giorgio Bassani—Il Romanzo di Ferrara — captures a very particular and powerful historical reality: Italian Jewish life under Fascism, especially between the passage of the so-called racial laws in 1938 and the end of World War II. Set primarily in the provincial city of Ferrara, Bassani's narratives interweave themes of death, victimization, betrayal, survival, and artistic production. His best-known novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — and other works that concentrate on the crucial years of 1938-1945—stand at the center of the Romanzo.They are preceded by texts that look back on Jewish life in the liberal era of the Risorgimento, and followed by texts set in the liberated, democratic society of the postwar years. These framing narratives provide a space for remembrance and reflection.

Marilyn Schneider's aim, in Vengeance of the Victim, is to uncover the symbolic layers — historical, spatial, topographical, mythopoeic, allegorical, and sexual — that five Bassani's texts their richness and ambiguity, and in so doing to achieve a full understanding of his work and its representation of the Italian Jewish experience. Death and victimization, which pervade these texts, set in motion a process of artistic renewal that is most fully embodied in the vibrant young Micol Finzi-Contini, Bassani's textual icon and a victim of the Holocaust. Schneider also finds that the narratives, especially the late ones, pay self-reflexive attention to the creation of the text, constructing an authorial persona engaged in an existential, moral, and artistic journey from symbolic death to rebirth. It is the writing subject's successful completion of the journey that constitutes the vengeance of the victim.

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The Victim and its Masks

An Essay on Sacrifice and Masquerade in the Maghreb

Abdellah Hammoudi

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Each year, in a solemn Sunni Muslim feast, the Ait Mizane of southern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual sacrifice, a symbolic observance of their submission to the divine. After this sober ceremony comes a bacchanalian masquerade which seems to violate every principle the sacrifice affirmed. Because of the apparent contradiction between sacrifice and masquerade, observers have described the two as entirely separate events. This book reunites them as a single ritual process within Islamic tradition.

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Victim of History

Cardinal Mindszenty, a biography

Margit Balogh

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

“Victim of history,” “a martyr from behind the Iron Curtain,” “the Hungarian Gandhi” – these are just some of the epithets which people used to describe Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, who was the last Hungarian prelate to use the title of prince primate. Today, Mindszenty has been forgotten in most countries except for Hungary, but when he died in 1975, he was known all over the world as a symbol of the struggle of the Catholic Church against communism. Cardinal Mindszenty held the post of archbishop of Esztergom from 1945 until 1974, but during this period of almost three decades he served barely four years in office. The political police arrested him on December 26, 1948, and the Budapest People’s Court subsequently sentenced him to life imprisonment. Based on the Stalinist practice of show trials, one of the accusations against Mindszenty, referring to his legitimist leanings, was his alleged attempt to re-establish Habsburg rule in Hungary. He regained freedom during the 1956 revolution but only for a few days. He was granted refuge by the US Embassy in Budapest between November 4, 1956 –September 28, 1971. In the fifteen years he spent at the American embassy enormous changes took place in the world while his personality remained frozen into the past. When in 1971 Pope Paul VI received the Hungarian foreign minister, he called Mindszenty “the victim of history”. His last years were spent free at last, but far away from his homeland. In Hungary, the Catholic believers eagerly await his beatification.

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Victim of the Muses

Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History

Todd Merlin Compton

Harvard University Press, 2006

This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos—the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis—after satirizing the Delphians.

In much the same way, Dumezil's Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression, are necessary to society, yet dangerous to society.

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