A History of American Crime Fiction
A History of American Crime Fiction
£98.99
GBPA History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.
- Divided into sections similar to those used when teaching canonical literary history in university English classes, making it useful for instructors of literary historical period based classes and scholars focusing on those periods
- Includes more extensive treatment of television crime fiction than previous histories, making it of interest non-academic readers
- Proposes a new view of crime fiction history as intertwined with canonical literary history, appealing to readers interested in both popular fiction forms and literary fiction forms
Reviews & endorsements
'Starting with the Puritans and continuing through to the present day, this collection comprises 25 original essays on American crime fiction, including film and television (The Sopranos and others). Raczkowski (Univ. of South Alabama) goes beyond the usual generic markers of crime fiction …' Choice
'… this informed, substantive collection does leave us questioning the profiles and line-ups through which we more typically organize its important objects of inquiry. In this respect, the future histories of crime fiction seem well in hand.' Christopher P. Wilson, American Literary History
Product details
March 2018Hardback
9781107131019
372 pages
235 × 160 × 25 mm
0.65kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Christopher Raczkowski
- Part I. Early American Era:
- 1. From sermon to story: early American crime literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams
- 2. The theft of authorship: crime narrative in post-revolutionary early American literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams
- Part II. Romantic Era:
- 3. Crime journalism and the urban Gothic novel Matthew Warner Osborn
- 4. Crime and American romanticism Timothy Helwig
- 5. The Dark transactions of a Black? Slave narratives in the crime literature tradition Jeannine Marie DeLombard
- 6. Edgar Allan Poe and the emergence of the literary detective Paul Grimstad
- Part III. Realist Era:
- 7. The rise of the professional detective and the dime detective Pamela Bedore
- 8. Home and away: reinvestigating domestic detective fiction Jon Blandford
- 9. The rise of the American woman detective: gender and the detective genre in Green, Doyle, and Rinehart Ellen Burton Harrington
- 10. Crime, science, realism John Dudley
- Part IV. Modernist Era:
- 11. Criminal modernism Christopher Raczkowski
- 12. American golden age crime fiction Malcah Effron
- 13. Red Harvest: hard-boiled crime fiction and the fate of left populism Justus Nieland
- 14. Stateless mothers/motherless states: the femme fatale on the threshold of American citizenship Paula Rabinowitz
- 15. One of us: the emergence of the psychopathological protagonist Frederick Whiting
- Part V. Postmodernist Era:
- 16. Unusual suspects: American crimes, metaphysical detectives, postmodernist genres Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
- 17. Identity politics and crime fiction Michael Millner
- 18. American detective fiction and settler colonialism James H. Cox
- 19. African American crime and detective fiction Justin Gifford
- 20. Criminal family drama before and after The Sopranos Dean DeFino
- 21. Making murderers: the evolution of true crime Jean Murley
- 22. Spy narratives in post 9/11 American culture Andrew Pepper
- 23. Film noir and neo-noir Will Scheibel
- 24. Crime fiction television David Bianculli
- 25. Dead reckonings: theoretical and critical approaches to detective fiction Christopher Breu.
