Combining theoretical and practical approaches, this collection of essays explores classic detective fiction from a variety of contemporary viewpoints. Among the diverse perspectives are those which interrogate the way the genre reflects important social and cultural attitudes, contributes to a reader's ability to adapt to the challenges of daily life, and provides alternate takes on the role of the detective as an investigator and arbiter of truth.

Part I looks at the nature of and the audience for detective fiction, as well as at the genre as a literary form. This section includes an...

The detective, as a preeminent figure in all forms of American popular culture, has become the subject of a variety of theoretical exploration. By investigating that figure, these essays demonstrate how the genre embodies all the contradictions of American society and the ways in which literature and the media attempt to handle those contradictions. Issues of class, gender, and race; the interaction of film and literature; and generic evolution are fundamental to any understanding of the American detective in all of his or her forms.

Beginning with essays about Raymond...

Theo Angelopoulos is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive contemporary filmmakers and a highly idiosyncratic film stylist. His work, from the early 1970s to "The Beekeeper," "Landscape in the Mist," "The Suspended Step of the Stalk" and the recent Cannes prize-winner "Ulysses' Gaze," demonstrates a unique sensibility and a preoccupation with form (notably, the long take, space, and time) and with content, particularly Greek politics and history, and notions of the journey, border-crossing, and exile. This new collection of essays surveys his entire cinematic output and presents a...

This book is a study of Burrough's first six Tarzan books, revealing intriguing parallels between Tarzan's story and the sagas of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome.

The success of clown comedy is dependent on the comic or comics who take center stage. These comics are usually identified with a specific comedic shtick, physical or visual humor, and their underdog status. This study by film scholar Wes Gehring presents a brief, historical overview of major figures in the genre, including W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen. The comedians discussed are drawn from four genre periods: the silent era, the depression era, the post-World War II period, and the modern era.

Popular music may be viewed as primary documents of society, and "America's Musical Pulse" documents the American experience as recorded in popular sound. Whether jazz, blues, swing, country, or rock, the music, the impulse behind it, and the reaction to it reveal the attitudes of an era or generation. Always a major preoccupation of students, music is often ignored by teaching professionals, who might profitably channel this interest to further understandings of American social history and such diverse fields as sociology, political science, literature, communications, and business as...

"Radical Visions" discusses an important period in American film history: Films such as "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Midnight Cowboy," "Nashville," and "Taxi Driver" challenged the narrative structure and style of the classical Hollywood paradigm, transformed its conventional genres, exploded traditional American myths, and foregrounded a consciousness of the cinematic process. Film students, scholars, and aficionados will gain insight into generic conventions and narrative style presented within the cultural attitudes of the time.

The book features a...

John Andre was captured in September 1780, outside British lines, and was hanged as a spy. Forty years later, he was still so highly regarded that, in 1821, his body was exhumed and reburied in the Heroes' Corner of Westminster Abbey. This book argues that James Fenimore Cooper's second novel, "The Spy," is an examination of the nature and character of clandestinity in which the author investigates the morality of deceit and disguised intentions in normal life as well as in wartime by using the Andre affair as background. A century later, The Spy was undiscovered by British spy novelists....