Hard-Boiled Sentimentality - The Secret History of American Crime Stories

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-12691-5
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 447 g

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history links the testosterone-saturated heroes of American crime stories to the sensitive women of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. From classics like The Big Sleep and The Talented Mr. Ripley to neglected paperback gems, Cassuto chronicles the dialogue--centered on the power of sympathy--between these popular genres and the sweeping social changes of the twentieth century, ending with a surprising connection between today's serial killers and the domestic fictions of long ago.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cassuto, Leonard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Sentimentality, Sympathy, Serial Killers(Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, and others)Part I. Revising the Roots of the Hard-Boiled Tradition: The 1920s1. Crime and Sympathy(Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway)2. Hammett and the Hard-Boiled SentimentalPart II. Reading the Hard-Boiled Sentimental: From the Thirties to the Fifties3. Depression Domesticity(James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. Also Horace McCoy, Damon Runyon, Erskine Caldwell)4. The Sentimental Action Hero in Cold War Crime Stories (Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, William P. McGivern, Wade Miller, John Evans [aka Howard Browne]. Also Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer)5. Sentimental Perversion: The Canonized Nonconformists of the Fifties (Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith) Part III: Crime Fiction at the Sentimental Apocalypse: The Rise of the Hard-Boiled Domestic Detective and the Serial Killer from the Sixties to the Present6. The Homely Heart of the Hard-Boiled: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald(Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Robert Bloch)7. Hard-Boiled Therapists, Hard-Boiled Women, and a Vigilante(Thomas Harris, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and others)8. Shades of Professional Sympathy: Race, Crime, Detection(Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, William P. McGivern, Dennis Lehane, and others)9. The Rise of the Serial Killer(Robert Finnegan, Truman Capote, Thomas Harris. Also Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz, Gil Brewer, Alice Sebold, and others)NotesSelected BibliographyAcknowledgmentsIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Leonard Cassuto is professor of English at Fordham University and an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in academic journals and popular periodicals ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Salon.com. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture and the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel.