Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction

ISBN-13: 9780199253265 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 328 str.

Lee Horsley

Opis

Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion.
In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development Lee Horsley employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centered on transgressors or victims), and the "mixed" form of the police procedural.
The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing the development of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.

Recenzje

In Lee Horsley's commanding survey of a century of crime fiction, the reader, teacher or scholar will find a familiar historical trajectory: a quick summary of Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries leads into the classic clue puzzle, which contrasts with the hard-boiled American school. A thoughtful chapter addresses 'Transgression and Pathology', after which socio-political critique connects neatly with black appropriations and the 'chick dick'. Neglected areas such as the gangster novel and the environmental crime story are explored too.

O autorze

Lee Horsley came to England in 1965 as a Fulbright Scholar and has lived here ever since. She did her postgraduate work at the University of Reading and the University of Birmingham, and had a research post at Wadham College, Oxford, 1971-73. She has been a lecturer at the University of Lancaster since 1974 - currently teaching twentieth-century British and American literature and two specialist crime courses. Over the last fifteen years, she has written Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990), Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995), and The Noir Thriller (2001). In collaboration with her daughter, Katharine, she has written several articles on crime fiction and started a highly successful website devoted to the academic study of crime fiction and film, www.crimeculture.com; she is also co-editor and webmaster for www.pulporiginals.com, which aims to make some of the best mid-century American crime paperbacks available as e-books.