A History of American Crime Fiction

This book outlines the cultural and historical contexts in which crime fiction participates, surveying the ideas animating its study today.

Chris Raczkowski (Edited by)

9781107131019, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2017

372 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'… 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

A 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Crime & criminology [JKV], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]