You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1929, Ronald Knox, a prominent member of the English Detection Club, included in his tongue-in-cheek Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists the rule that "No Chinaman must figure in the story." In 1983, Ruth Rendell published Speaker of Mandarin, reflecting not only a change in British detective fiction but also a dramatic change in the British cultural landscape. Like much of the rest of British popular culture, the detective novel became more and more ethnically diverse and populated by characters with increasingly varied religious backgrounds. Ten essays examine the changing nature of British detective fiction, focusing on the shifting view of "otherness" of such authors as Ruth Rend...
Confluences looks at the prospects for and the potential rewards of breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser’s study emphasizes the confluences among three major theories that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifyin(g), and Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic. For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in postcolonial or African American literary studies to at...
Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.
Inthis book, Laurence Roth argues that the popular genre of Jewish detective stories offers new insights into the construction of ethnic and religious identity. Roth frames his study with the concept of "kosher hybridity" to look at the complex process of mediation between Jewish and American culture in which Jewish writers voice the desire to be both different from and yet the same as other Americans. He argues that the detective story, located at the intersection of narrative and popular culture in modern America, examines the need for order in a disorderly society, and thus offers a window into the negotiation of Jewish identity differing from that of literary fiction. The writers of thes...
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?
Essays by Owen E. Brady, Kelly C. Connelly, Juan F. Elices, Keith Hughes, Derek C. Maus, Jerrilyn McGregory, Laura Quinn, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Daniel Stein, Lisa B. Thompson, Terrence Tucker, and Albert U. Turner, Jr. In Finding a Way Home, thirteen essays by scholars from four countries trace Walter Mosley's distinctive approach to representing African American responses to the feeling of homelessness in an inhospitable America. Mosley (b. 1952) writes frequently of characters trying to construct an idea of home and wrest a sense of dignity, belonging, and hope from cultural and communal resources. These essays examine Mosley's queries about the meaning of “home” in various social...
Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.
Provides a lively introduction to what is both a wide-ranging and hugely popular literary genre. Accessible and clear, this comprehensive overview is the essential guide for all those studying crime fiction.
Evidence of Things Not Seen is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. When mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fiction writers center fantastical blackness, they make this expressive quality available to a broad audience that uses pop fictions' imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres' imaginable possibilities help us strategize ways that the made up can be made real.