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This book outlines the cultural and historical contexts in which crime fiction participates, surveying the ideas animating its study today.
List 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.
About the author
Chris Raczkowski is associate professor of English at the University of South Alabama. His work on American literature and culture has appeared in numerous academic journals and anthologies and he is currently at work on a manuscript on modernism and crime titled, sensibly enough, Criminal Modernism (forthcoming).
Summary
A History of American Crime Fiction fuses the history of popular crime fiction genres with traditional literary history as currently taught in university English departments. It will appeal to lay readers, students, and academics.
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