1st Edition
The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Re-searching the Premises: The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, Alfred Bendixen
Foundations:
1 Crime and Detection in Mark Twain
Peter Messent
2 Lizzie Borden, Spinster on Trial: Journalism, Literature, and the Borden Trial
Karen Roggenkamp
3 Dreiser, Dey, and Dime-Novel Crime: The Case of Nick Carter
Nathaniel Williams
Modernist Crime:
4 The Gatsby Murder Case: F. Scott Fitzgerald, S. S. Van Dine, and Analytic Detective Fiction in the 1920s
Kirk Curnutt
5 Preservation and Promotion: Ellery Queen, Magazine Publishing, and the Marketing of Detective Fiction
Matthew Levay
6 Diversions of Furniture and Signature Styles: Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald
Lee Clark Mitchell
7 Faulkner and the Criminality of Modernity
Deborah Clarke
8 Fatal Eyeballing: Sex, Violence and Intimate Voyeurism in Richard Wright’s Native Son Andrew Warnes
Crime After Modernism:
9 Murderous Neglect in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction
Marshall Bruce Gentry
10 Remorse and Redemption: The Crime Fiction of Andre Dubus
Olivia Carr Edenfield
11 On Manliness and a Personal Sense of Fitness for Citizenship: Chester Himes and Telling Details in Clothing
Norlisha F. Crawford
12 Copy That: Joseph Nazel and African American Crime Narrative in the 1970s
Kinohi Nishikawa
13 "Swarming Like an Army": Odyssean Warcraft in Elmore Leonard’s Early Crime Novels" Charles J. Rzepka
14 Cormac McCarthy’s Mosaic of Crime and Evil
Allen Josephs
Notes on Contributors
Biography
Alfred Bendixen is Lecturer in the Departments of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and First Year Program at Princeton University, USA.
Olivia Carr Edenfield is Professor in the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Georgia Southern University, USA.
"The collection would appeal to those specialising in American popular culture or American modernism. It would be of particular interest for those working on Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and the postmodern author Cormac McCarthy or those working on the masters of the crime fiction genre such as Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, and Elmore Leonard. The collection as a whole expresses the importance of crime within American literature and the imaginary line dividing genre and literary fiction."
- Anna Kirsch, The International Crime Fiction Association
