Class and Culture in Crime Fiction

Class and Culture in Crime Fiction
Author: Julie H. Kim
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2014-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476615381

The crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies focusing on the intersections of class, culture and crime--each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race and politics. The ten new essays herein raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is "class" understood in detective fiction, other than as a socioeconomic marker? Can we distinguish between major British and American class concerns as they relate to crime? How politically informed is popular detective fiction in responding to economic crises in Scotland, Ireland, England and the United States? When issues of race and gender intersect with concerns of class and culture, does the crime writer privilege one or another factor? Do values and preoccupations of a primarily middle-class readership get reflected in popular detective fiction?

Class and Culture in Crime Fiction

Class and Culture in Crime Fiction
Author: Julie H. Kim
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2014-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786473231

The crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies focusing on the intersections of class, culture and crime--each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race and politics. The ten new essays herein raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is "class" understood in detective fiction, other than as a socioeconomic marker? Can we distinguish between major British and American class concerns as they relate to crime? How politically informed is popular detective fiction in responding to economic crises in Scotland, Ireland, England and the United States? When issues of race and gender intersect with concerns of class and culture, does the crime writer privilege one or another factor? Do values and preoccupations of a primarily middle-class readership get reflected in popular detective fiction?

The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture

The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture
Author: Alfred Bendixen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317190718

This collection of essays by leading scholars insists on a larger recognition of the importance and diversity of crime fiction in U.S. literary traditions. Instead of presenting the genre as the property of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, this book maps a larger territory which includes the domains of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy and other masters of fiction.The essays in this collection pay detailed attention to both the genuine artistry and the cultural significance of crime fiction in the United States. It emphasizes American crime fiction’s inquiry into the nature of democratic society and its exploration of injustices based on race, class, and/or gender that are specifically located in the details of American experience.Each of these essays exists on its own terms as a significant contribution to scholarship, but when brought together, the collection becomes larger than the sum of its pieces in detailing the centrality of crime fiction to American literature. This is a crucial book for all students of American fiction as well as for those interested in the literary treatment of crime and detection, and also has broad appeal for classes in American popular culture and American modernism.

Comic Book Crime

Comic Book Crime
Author: Nickie D. Phillips
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814764525

Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes’ calculations of “deathworthiness,” or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero’s character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.

The Contemporary American Crime Novel

The Contemporary American Crime Novel
Author: Andrew Pepper
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781579583521

As America's ethnic and racial character undergoes explosive transformation, its crime fictions trace, contest and celebrate the changes.The Contemporary American Crime Novelis an exciting book that offers a comprehensive review of recent developments in American crime fiction, exploring America's dynamic, fragmented multicultural landscape and how it has transformed the codes and conventions of the crime novel. Featured authors include James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky, Barbara Wilson, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Faye Kellerman, Alex Abella, and Chang-Rae Lee.

Lives Laid Away

Lives Laid Away
Author: Stephen Mack Jones
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616959606

Detroit ex-cop August Snow takes up vigilante justice when his beloved neighborhood of Mexicantown is caught in the crosshairs of a human trafficking scheme. When the body of an unidentified young Hispanic woman is dredged from the Detroit River, the Wayne County coroner gives her photo to ex-police detective August Snow, insisting August ask around his native Mexicantown to see if anyone recognizes her. August’s good friend Elena, an advocate for undocumented immigrants, immediately pinpoints the girl as local teenager Isadora del Torres. It turns out Izzy isn’t the only young woman to have disappeared during an ICE raid only to turn up dead a few weeks later. Preyed upon by the law itself, the people of Mexicantown have no one to turn to but August. In a guns-blazing wild ride across Detroit, he will put his own life on the line to protect the community he loves.

Capital Offenses

Capital Offenses
Author: Simon Joyce
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813921808

By 1900 crime appears as a distinctively modern problem, requiring large-scale solutions and government intervention in place of an older approach rooted in personal morality or philanthropic paternalism.".

Detective Fiction

Detective Fiction
Author: Charles J. Rzepka
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2005-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780745629421

'Detective Fiction' is a clear and compelling look at some of the best known, yet least-understood characters and texts of the modern day. Undergraduate students of Detective and Crime Fiction and of genre fiction in general, will find this book essential reading.

August Snow

August Snow
Author: Stephen Mack Jones
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616957190

Winner of the Hammett Prize and the Nero Award From the wealthy suburbs to the remains of Detroit’s bankrupt factory districts, August Snow is a fast-paced tale of murder, greed, sex, economic cyber-terrorism, race and urban decay. Tough, smart, and struggling to stay alive, August Snow is the embodiment of Detroit. The son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother, August grew up in the city’s Mexicantown and joined the police force only to be drummed out by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12 million wrongful dismissal settlement that left him low on friends. He has just returned to the house he grew up in after a year away, and quickly learns he has many scores to settle. It’s not long before he’s summoned to the palatial Grosse Pointe Estates home of business magnate Eleanore Paget. Powerful and manipulative, Paget wants August to investigate the increasingly unusual happenings at her private wealth management bank. But detective work is no longer August’s beat, and he declines. A day later, Paget is dead of an apparent suicide—which August isn’t buying for a minute. What begins as an inquiry into Eleanore Paget’s death soon drags August into a rat’s nest of Detroit’s most dangerous criminals, from corporate embezzlers to tattooed mercenaries.

Savage Appetites

Savage Appetites
Author: Rachel Monroe
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1501188895

A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.