De/mythologizing Jack the Ripper: Fictional Appropriations as a Metanarrative of Constructing and Reading Serial Murder
Jack the Ripper cannot be contained. This much rings true for the historical criminal, yet in another sense also applies to the popular cultural counterpart. Despite their cultural pervasiveness and no lack of so-called “final” solutions offered by Ripperologists and creative writers alike, the Ripper remains defined by an almost quintessential elusiveness. De/mythologizing Jack the Ripper approaches this paradox by foregrounding its imaginative rather than its criminological dimension. Considering the lingering condition of mystery as both epistemological problem and invitation to creative potential, this part literary, part mythographic study investigates Ripper fiction as adaptations and thus interpretations of an already inherently fragmentary, indeterminate historical text lacking canonical authority into a highly intertextual culture-text which defies containment by decade, medium, genre, or often any sense of fidelity to historical reality. With particular focus on early narratives and more recent treatments, comparative readings chart the ways in which fictional representations of the Ripper give meaning to mystery. De/mythologizing draws on the multi-faceted concept of myth to shed new light on the development of Ripper narratives as ‘culturally significant stories’ in early group-texts The Lodger and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper through almost opposing etiological and symbolic principles. Later intrusions of intertexts Sherlock Holmes and Dracula serve another tension, examined as mechanisms to stabilise meaning for the Ripper by external influence, or in turn to destabilise traditional order in those sources. Following in this deconstructive angle, postmodern ‘dissections’ of history From Hell and Limehouse Golem are analysed as metanarratives of the collapse of singular significance itself inside the Ripper myth – as well as the desire to (re)establish meaning nonetheless.
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