American Crime Fiction

A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-319-79031-2
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 222 Seiten, Previously published in hardcover, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 3152 g

Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining literary standards. Asking, in effect, a series of questions about the nature of genre fiction as art, successive chapters look at American crime writers whose careers throw light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics: Dashiell Hammett, John Grisham, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Nelson DeMille, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Swirski, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

CHAPTER 1. Nobrow: Contents and Discontents

The Most Ossified Popular Genre of All—Of the Standard of Taste—Flogging a Dead Horse—Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t—Heads I Win, Tails You Lose—Vice and Its Victim—Beachbooks for Intellectuals—Sex, Money, and Revenge

   

CHAPTER 2. Briefcases for Hire: Dashiell Hammett and John Grisham

The Pauper and the Prince—The Toast of Hollywood—Waldron Honeywell—Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—Pow, You Are There— Seven Thousand Liquor Cases—Vacant Niche in the Market—The Banzhaf Bandits—Worst of Pages—Exhibit A— One Part Hammett, Two Parts Grisham

CHAPTER 3. Boilerplate Potboilers: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway

Good God, I Can’t Publish This—Guts and Genitals—Southern Gothic—Murder Capital of the United States—Sanctuary Much—Worse than Dresden—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?—.38 Police Special—The Great American Paradox

 

CHAPTER 4. The Not So Simple Art of Murder: Raymond Chandler

No Chinaman Must Figure in the Story—Mayhem Spiced with Nymphomania—A Bombshell Redhead on the Run—The Is to Was Man—Pirandello Minus the Obtrusiveness—At Odds with the Canon—Wise Man, Wink, Wink—A Whodunit Without a Dunit—The Great Wrong Place—Anytown, USA—I Cannot Work or Sleep Till I Have Finished It

CHAPTER 5. The Urban Procedural: Ed McBain

Big Lights, Big City—Salvatore Albert Lombino—Graphic and Photographic—The Worst in Christendom—Colonel Mustard and Lady Buxom—M*E*T*R*O*P*O*L*I*S*—Nothing but a Woman—Mischief—The N Word—Behind the Thin Blue Line—Crime and the City

CHAPTER 6. Take Two: Nelson DeMille and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Eppolito and Caracappa—Jack Cannon—Trouble Brews in Happy Valley—All Its Watches Limp—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—The Most Dangerous Country in the World—Take Two—We Keep You Clean in Muscatine—American Dream

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. Specialist in American literature and American studies, and Amazon's #1 Bestseller in American Literature, American History and Criticism, and Canadian Literary Criticism, he is the author of sixteen award-winning books, including the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005); a trio of bestsellers on American literature, culture, and politics: Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010); American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), and American Political Fictions (2015); and a tour de force on thinking and creative computers From Literature to Biterature (2013).