In "The American Roman Noir," William Marling reads classic hard-boiled fiction and film in the contexts of narrative theories and American social and cultural history. His search for the origins of the dark narratives that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s leads to a sweeping critique of Jazz-Age and Depression-era culture. Integrating economic history, biography, consumer product design, narrative analysis, and film scholarship, Marling makes new connections between events of the 1920s and 1930s and the modes, styles, and genres of their representation.
At the center of Marling's...
In "The American Roman Noir," William Marling reads classic hard-boiled fiction and film in the contexts of narrative theories and American social ...