Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £9.10
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £9.10, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
In Lee Horsley's commanding survey of a century of crime fiction, the reader, teacher or scholar will find a familiar historical trajectory: a quick summary of Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries leads into the classic clue puzzle, which contrasts with the hard-boiled American school. A thoughtful chapter addresses 'Transgression and Pathology', after which socio-political critique connects neatly with black appropriations and the 'chick dick'. Neglected areas such as the gangster novel and the environmental crime story are explored too. (THES )
Product Description
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion. In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development Lee Horsley employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centred on transgressors or victims), and the 'mixed' form of the police procedural. The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing the development of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction' is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the development of popular fiction in the last century. Although the focus is on crime fiction, most, if not all of the book's central discussions can be usefully applied to other forms of genre fiction. Whilst reading it I found that I began to understand the mechanics of crime fiction and at the same time gained a really good insight into some of the major preoccupations of genre fiction in the twentieth century.
There is real substance to the two parts of this book. In the first part it is easy to get to grips with the different sub-genres of crime fiction as the author gives lots of great examples that make you want to go and read in full the stories that are discussed. I am a big fan of classic detective fiction and the first chapter made very interesting reading. The second part is packed with information that highlights just why crime fiction has such an important place twentieth century culture. Quite a few times I found that the author had introduced me to a new way of looking at a story that I was already familiar with. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on feminist crime fiction and the final chapter which looks forward into this century. If this author is correct (which I am sure she is) then there's certainly a very exciting future in store for this genre!
I get the sense with this book that the author really wants the reader to enjoy reading and understanding crime fiction as much as she has. It is rare to find an academic book that is written in such an enthusiastic and fascinating fashion and yet authored by someone with clear expertise and detailed knowledge of the field. I've read this author's previous book, 'The Noir Thriller', and I would highly recommend both.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
