Unimaginable Crime and Imaginary Criminals: The Thorvald Sletten Matricide Case 1899-1907

Abstract

‘Unimaginable Crime and Imaginary Criminals: The Thorvald Sletten Matricide Case 1899–1907’, by Silje Warberg, moves the discussion to the nineteenth-century Norwegian print media. In particular, Warberg investigates the role played by fictional and non-fictional texts in the changing debates and public image of a convicted parricide. The chapter reveals the interaction between these texts and their surrounding contexts, and the negotiation of historical, cultural and literary criminal understandings of scandal, crime and parricide at the turn of the twentieth century.