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Bran Nicol chronicles the history of stalking, showing how acts of extreme obsession have created a public fixation of their own.
Collects together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last 40 years, guiding readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates.
From Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Jake Gittes, private eyes have made for some of the most memorable characters in cinema. We often view these detectives as lone wolves who confront and try to make sense of a violent and chaotic modern world. Bran Nicol challenges this stereotype in The Private Eye and offers a fresh take on this iconic character and the film noir genre. Nicol traces the history of private eye movies from the influential film noirs of the 1940s to 1970s neonoir cinema, whose slow and brilliant decline gave way to the fading of detectives into movie mythology today. Analyzing a number of classic films—including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye—he reveals that while these movies are ostensibly thrillers, they are actually occupied by issues of work and love. The private eye is not a romantic hero, Nicol argues, but a figure who investigates the concealments of others at the expense of his own private life. Combining a lucid introduction to an underexplored tradition in movie history with a new approach to the detective in film, this book casts new light on the private worlds of the private eye.
A lucid exploration of the key features of postmodernism and the most important authors from Beckett to DeLillo.
It scares—and titillates—in such movies as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Basic Instinct. It violently ended the lives of legendary artists such as Selena and John Lennon, and thousands of people endure it daily in anonymity from ex-lovers and strangers. Stalking has been a fact of human society for a surprisingly long time, yet it is only in the last two decades that the term “stalking” came into wide use throughout mass culture. Bran Nicol traces here the history of stalking and chronicles how acts of extreme obsession have created a public fixation of their own. This unprecedented study draws on a wealth of sources—including forensic psychology, films, literature, news repor...
This collection of essays provides a critique of the popular and powerful genre of confessional writing. Contributors discuss a range of poetry, prose and drama, including the work of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.
Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction considers one of the major British novelists of the post-war years in a new light, arguing that Murdoch's compulsive plots and characters are strongly motivated by the question of the past. Drawing on many of her key works, and providing the first analysis of her 'first-person retrospective' novels as a separate group within the larger body of her fiction, the book also considers Murdoch's relation to key currents within twentieth-century thought, like modernism. postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.
Accessible exploration of Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to late-Victorian culture as well as his ongoing significance and popularity.
Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.