Framing the serial killer in Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter trilogy : a corpus-assisted critical stylistic approach

Abstract EN

This paper uses a combination of corpus-based and qualitative approaches to investigate the 'framing' of criminals in fiction on serial killers, particularly in the works of the top-selling novelist Thomas Harris.

These works feature detectives/psychologists and villains who tend to be psychopathic men involved in criminal actions that range from kidnapping to murder.

Framing can be used to understand and explore how an entity is constructed, communicated and shaped.

It can be defined as 'schemata' or repertoires of organized patterns of thinking which can be triggered by the framing devices presented in the text (Kitzinger, 2007).

Using WordSmith5, the frequency of words related to 'killers' and 'murder' and the concordance lines of the names of each serial killer used as node words, are all extracted and examined.

Concordance lines, which present 'the analyst with instances of a word or cluster in its immediate co-text' (Baker et al.

, 2008: 279), are examined qualitatively to identify linguistic patterns using the critical stylistic tools proposed by Jeffries (2010a).

This paper, to a large extent, shows that the suggested corpus-assisted critical stylistic approach provides a comprehensive model for the study of the serial killers in the selected novels, and possibly, and more generally, for the study of characters in fiction.

Indeed, the main achievement of this approach which involves a synergy of quantitative and qualitative methods is the provision of a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of large amounts of data.