The Big Somewhere

Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2020
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-6167-8 (ISBN)

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James Ellroy’s identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy’s early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy’s life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction.

The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World is an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Flügge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels.

The ‘Big Somewhere’ is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.

Steven Powell is an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the editor of Conversations with James Ellroy (2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (2012). His most recent work is James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (2016).

Introduction
Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)

Part I: Genre and Literary Influences
1. “Tragic Power”: The Influence of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett on the Work of James Ellroy
Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
2. “No Man's Land”: Broken Men and Traumatized Police Officers in The Onion Field and The Black Dahlia
Jim Mancall (Wheaton College, USA)

Part II: Ellroy and Noir
3. “Capable of Anything”: Dudley Smith’s Role in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartets
Anna Flügge (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)
4. “Geography is Destiny”: Cinematising the City in the L.A. Quartet
Nathan Ashman (University of Surrey, UK)

Part III: "America was Never Innocent": Underworld and Government Power Structures
5. Between Althusser and Foucault: Power Relations in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy
Rubén Peinado Abarrio (Independent Scholar)
6. Paradoxes of Race in the L.A. Quartet
Joshua Meyer (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
7. The Divine Violence of Underworld USA
Rodney Taveira (University of Sydney, Australia)
8. From Paranoia to the Contrary: Plotting the Noir World of James Ellroy
Woody Haut (Independent Scholar)

Part IV: Ellroy and After: The Ellrovian Influence on Authors and Genre
9. ‘‘A Pointed Demythologization”: The Influence of James Ellroy's Novels on Megan Abbott’s Revisionism of the Femme Fatale
Diana Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
10. Individual and Institutionalised Corruption: The Influence of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet on the Novels of David Peace
David Bishop (Independent Scholar) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)

Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	25.01.2020
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	308 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-6167-8 / 1501361678
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-6167-8 / 9781501361678
Zustand	Neuware