Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television

Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television
Author: Deborah E. Barker
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807172693

Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, & Television, edited by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey, examines the often-overlooked and undervalued impact of the U.S. South on the origins and development of the detective genre and film noir. This wide-ranging collection engages with ongoing discussions about genre, gender, social justice, critical race theory, popular culture, cinema, and mass media. Focusing on the South, these essays uncover three frequently interrelated themes: the acknowledgment of race as it relates to slavery, segregation, and discrimination; the role of land as a source of income, an ecologically threatened space, or a place of seclusion; and the continued presence of the southern gothic in recurring elements such as dilapidated plantation houses, swamps, family secrets, and the occult. Twenty-two critical essays probe how southern detective narratives intersect with popular genre forms such as neo-noir, hard-boiled fiction, the dark thriller, suburban noir, amateur sleuths, journalist detectives, and television police procedurals. Alongside essays by scholars, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television presents pieces by authors of detective and crime fiction, including Megan Abbott and Ace Atkins, who address the extent to which the South and its artistic traditions influenced their own works. By considering the diversity of authors and characters associated with the genre, this accessible collection provides an overdue examination of the historical, political, and aesthetic contexts out of which the southern detective narrative emerged and continues to evolve.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2020)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2020)
Author: Elizabeth Foxwell
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476641455

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2024)
Author: Caroline Reitz
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2024-05-17
Genre:
ISBN: 1476654425

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

Eudora Welty and Mystery

Eudora Welty and Mystery
Author: Jacob Agner
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2022-12-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496842723

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology
Author: Nathan Ashman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2023-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000984516

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is the first comprehensive examination of crime fiction and ecocriticism. Across 33 innovative chapters from leading international scholars, this Handbook considers an emergent field of contemporary crime narratives that are actively responding to a diverse assemblage of global environmental concerns, whilst also opening up ‘classic’ crime fictions and writers to new ecocritical perspectives. Rigorously engaged with cutting-edge critical trends, it places the familiar staples of crime fiction scholarship – from thematic to formal approaches – in conversation with a number of urgent ecological theories and ideas, covering subjects such as environmental security, environmental justice, slow violence, ecofeminism and animal studies. The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is an essential introduction to this new and dynamic research field for both students and scholars alike.

Faulkner, Welty, Wright

Faulkner, Welty, Wright
Author: Annette Trefzer
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2024-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496851102

Contributions by Anita DeRouen, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, W. Ralph Eubanks, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Bernard T. Joy, John Wharton Lowe, Anne MacMaster, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and Ryoichi Yamane Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections—or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences—across texts, authors, identities, and traditions. In the collection, contributors discuss Faulkner’s Light in August; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; “A Rose for Emily”; and “That Evening Sun”; Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings; One Time, One Place; The Optimist’s Daughter; Losing Battles; “Why I Live at the P.O.”; “Livvie”; “Moon Lake”; “The Burning”; “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”; and “The Demonstrators”; and Wright’s Native Son; The Long Dream; 12 Million Black Voices; Black Boy; Lawd Today!; “The Man Who Lived Underground”; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”; and “Long Black Song.” Acknowledging that Mississippi ground was never level for any of the three writers, the fourteen essays in this volume turn from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.

Television for Women

Television for Women
Author: Rachel Moseley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317428471

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of ‘television for women’. In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender still matter? The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also historical span. Additionally, whilst the influential methodological formation of production, text and audience is still visible here, the new research in Television for Women frequently reconfigures that relationship. The topics included here are far-reaching; from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women’s roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under. This book presents ground-breaking research on historical and contemporary relationships between women and television around the world and is an ideal resource for students of television, media and gender studies.

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture
Author: John G. Cawelti
Publisher: Popular Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780299196349

For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and drag king, a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers. In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life s work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone s subjects have managed despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference to construct passionate, inspiring lives. Finalist, Foreword Magazine s Anthology of the Year Outstanding Book in the High School Category, selected by the American Association of School Libraries Best Book in Special Interest Category, selected by the Public Library Association "

Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media

Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media
Author: Nick Bentley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2018-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319731890

This collection explores the representation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures in a range of texts and contexts. It brings together scholars working in literary studies, screen studies, sociology and cultural studies whose research interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth. It contributes to, and extends, contemporary theoretical perspectives around youth and youth cultures. Contributors examine a range of topics, including ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s, novels by subcultural writers such as Colin MacInnes, Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland, as well as screen representations of Mods, the 1990s Rave culture, heavy metal, and the Manchester scene. Others explore interventions into subcultural theory with respect to metal, subcultural locations, abjection, graffiti cultures, and the potential of subcultures to resist dominant power frameworks in both historical and contemporary contexts.