A History of American Crime Fiction

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

Author: Chris Raczkowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 10/26/2017
Pages: 372
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.41lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.46w x 1.08d
ISBN: 9781107131019

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2018

About the Author
Raczkowski, Chris: - Chris Raczkowski is associate professor of English at the University of South Alabama. His work on American literature and culture has appeared in numerous academic journals and anthologies and he is currently at work on a manuscript on modernism and crime titled, sensibly enough, Criminal Modernism (forthcoming).