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"A genuinely original, terrifically interesting book."--Dana Nelson, author of "National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men"
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
The Advent of Detective Fiction and the Postbellum Period
1. "To Trace a Lie, to Discover a Disguisse" : Genres of Crime and Secrecy
2. "The Eye of Suspicion": The Erotics of Detection in The Dead Letter
3. The Loop of Surveillance in The Figure Eight and Hagar's Daughter
Anna Katharine Green and the Gilded Age
4. " A Woman with a Secret": Knowing and Telling in The Leavenworth Case
5. " A Woman's Hand": Good Works and the Woman Detective
Mary Roberts Rinehart and the Modern Era
6. "No Place for a Spinster" : The Architecture of Retrospection in The Circular Staircase
7. " I suppose They Stood It as Long as They Could": Mothers, Daughters, and Axe Murder in The Album
Afterword
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Catherine Ross Nickerson is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Emory University.
Summary
A study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War and World War II, this book shows how these women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction to create a subgenre - "domestic detective fiction." It focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition.
