Parenthood is a role that shapes the lives of parents and children. According to the sociology of families and marriages, criminology, and the sociology of punishment, the most alienated individuals in unequal America practice parenthood in fragile families struggling with poverty, the code of the street, and under correctional supervision. In attempts to connect and contribute to these literatures, this research project examines how individuals' delinquent/criminal role performance on the street stage and client/inmate role performance on the correctional stage influence their parent role performance on the home stage. To do so, this qualitative study collected 57 semi-structured interviews (12 mothers and 45 fathers) and analyzes participants' parent role, delinquent/criminal role, and client/inmate role. The findings suggest that a cross-generational role conflict shapes participants' parent role performance throughout their life course. Although conflicting roles (roles with conflicting expectations) can coexist in the self, limited resources (time, energy, and money) and problematic boundaries (weak or impenetrable) between social situations bring role conflict to the center of role performance. In this case, the role conflict between participants' ideal parent role on the home stage, delinquent/criminal role on the street stage, and client/inmate role on the correctional stage shapes participants' parent role performance throughout their life course.

The project examines how German- and English-speaking translators of selected Maigret novels by the Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon have dealt with cultural and linguistic specificity, with a view to shedding light on how culture and language translate. Following a survey of different theories of translation, an integrated theory is applied in order to highlight what Simenon’s translators have retained and lost from three selected source texts: Le Charretier de la Providence (1931), Les Mémoires de Maigret (1951) and Maigret et les braves gens (1961). The examination of issues of linguistic and cultural specificity is facilitated by application of an integrated theory of translation coupled with the methodology devised by Hervey, Higgins and Loughridge (1992, 1995 and 2002). In addition, consideration of paradigms of detective fiction across the three cultures involved, and Simenon’s biography and wider oeuvre, help elucidate the salient features of the selected source texts. In view of the translators’ decisions, strategies for minimising various types of translation loss are presented. While other studies of translation theory have examined literary and technical texts, this study breaks new ground by focussing specifically on the comparative analysis of detective fiction in translation.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.