The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture

Alfred Bendixen is Lecturer in the Departments of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and First Year Program at Princeton University, USA. Olivia Carr Edenfield is Professor in the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Georgia Southern University, USA.

CONTENTS


Acknowledgements




List of Figures


Introduction: Re-searching the Premises: The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, Alfred Bendixen


Foundations:




1 Crime and Detection in Mark Twain


Peter Messent


2 Lizzie Borden, Spinster on Trial: Journalism, Literature, and the Borden Trial


Karen Roggenkamp


3 Dreiser, Dey, and Dime-Novel Crime: The Case of Nick Carter


Nathaniel Williams


Modernist Crime:




4 The Gatsby Murder Case: F. Scott Fitzgerald, S. S. Van Dine, and Analytic Detective Fiction in the 1920s


Kirk Curnutt


5 Preservation and Promotion: Ellery Queen, Magazine Publishing, and the Marketing of Detective Fiction


Matthew Levay


6 Diversions of Furniture and Signature Styles: Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald


Lee Clark Mitchell


7 Faulkner and the Criminality of Modernity


Deborah Clarke


8 Fatal Eyeballing: Sex, Violence and Intimate Voyeurism in Richard Wright’s Native Son Andrew Warnes


Crime After Modernism:




9 Murderous Neglect in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction


Marshall Bruce Gentry


10 Remorse and Redemption: The Crime Fiction of Andre Dubus


Olivia Carr Edenfield


11 On Manliness and a Personal Sense of Fitness for Citizenship: Chester Himes and Telling Details in Clothing


Norlisha F. Crawford


12 Copy That: Joseph Nazel and African American Crime Narrative in the 1970s


Kinohi Nishikawa


13 "Swarming Like an Army": Odyssean Warcraft in Elmore Leonard’s Early Crime Novels" Charles J. Rzepka


14 Cormac McCarthy’s Mosaic of Crime and Evil


Allen Josephs




Notes on Contributors