The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-76982-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 265 Seiten, Gewicht: 250 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel examines the psychopath as a new kind of monster. Frederick Whiting reads novels – ranging from pulp fiction to belles lettres – that draw on science, law, and popular journalism to try to explain this threatening new creature. Through these readings, this book uncovers the ways in which the figure of the psychopath that populated so many twentieth-century American novels expressed cultural anxieties about sexuality, race, gender, and class – even as the psychopath marked the shifting boundaries of the category of 'the human.' Whiting offers an interdisciplinary analysis showing how literature, science, law, and popular journalism inform each other. Ultimately, he concludes, this episode in the genealogy of monstrosity amounts to a transformation in the evolving concept of the monstrous itself – from a violation of our nature to a violation of our narratives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whiting, Frederick

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. The inner limits: of psychology and teratology; 1. From whodunnit to whatisit: detective fiction and the psychopath's novel emergence; 2. Problematic youth: psychopathy and the Black bildungsroman; 3. Confessional conformity: Lolita, the law, and the limits of formalism; 4. Redeeming the psychopath: autobiography as a novel, the novel as autobiography; 5. Mimesis and desire in In Cold Blood; Coda. The shape of things to come.

Über Autor(innen)

Whiting, Frederick
Frederick Whiting is the director of the Blount Scholars Program and an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. He studies American literature and culture and is an indefatigable advocate of liberal education.