Author: Heather Duerre Humann
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476628416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Since the middle of the last century, views on gender norms have shifted dramatically. Reflecting these changes, storylines that involve cross-dressing and transgender characters have frequently appeared in detective fiction--characters who subvert the conventions of the genre and challenge reader expectations. This examination of 20th and 21st century crime novels reveals what these narratives say about gender identity and gender expression and how they contributed to the evolution of detective fiction.
Gender Bending Detective Fiction
Author: Heather Duerre Humann
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476628416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Since the middle of the last century, views on gender norms have shifted dramatically. Reflecting these changes, storylines that involve cross-dressing and transgender characters have frequently appeared in detective fiction--characters who subvert the conventions of the genre and challenge reader expectations. This examination of 20th and 21st century crime novels reveals what these narratives say about gender identity and gender expression and how they contributed to the evolution of detective fiction.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476628416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Since the middle of the last century, views on gender norms have shifted dramatically. Reflecting these changes, storylines that involve cross-dressing and transgender characters have frequently appeared in detective fiction--characters who subvert the conventions of the genre and challenge reader expectations. This examination of 20th and 21st century crime novels reveals what these narratives say about gender identity and gender expression and how they contributed to the evolution of detective fiction.
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction
Author: Janice Allan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429842422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 887
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429842422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 887
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.
Creating the Fictional Female Detective
Author: Carla T. Kungl
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476609209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
This study examines a number of previously overlooked or undervalued women detective fiction writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and traces their relationship to later women writers who shaped the future of the genre: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Gladys Mitchell. This work argues that their use of the female detective character served as a means through which they were able to establish their professional authority in the detective fiction genre. Women writers employed a variety of narrative strategies to explore the tensions between society’s underlying domestic ideology and women’s entrance into the work force during this time period. Creating female detectives and employing these narrative strategies helped women writers establish professional authority by providing them with ways of expressing their ability to write in this genre and adapting it as a vehicle for women’s writing. The study examines the critical importance of early female detectives. Many critics and editors have dismissed these early detectives as conventional and trite, ignoring the genre’s rich variety. Yet female fictional detectives appear as both paid professionals and gifted amateurs; single, married, widowed; older spinsters and young adventurers; detecting for pleasure and to clear their own or a loved one's name. In choosing to create female detectives who were both varied and unusual, women writers confronted some of their own literary anxieties and ultimately were able to explore the ways they would create new routes to women’s authority within a male-dominated culture and specifically in the genre of detective fiction.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476609209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
This study examines a number of previously overlooked or undervalued women detective fiction writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and traces their relationship to later women writers who shaped the future of the genre: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Gladys Mitchell. This work argues that their use of the female detective character served as a means through which they were able to establish their professional authority in the detective fiction genre. Women writers employed a variety of narrative strategies to explore the tensions between society’s underlying domestic ideology and women’s entrance into the work force during this time period. Creating female detectives and employing these narrative strategies helped women writers establish professional authority by providing them with ways of expressing their ability to write in this genre and adapting it as a vehicle for women’s writing. The study examines the critical importance of early female detectives. Many critics and editors have dismissed these early detectives as conventional and trite, ignoring the genre’s rich variety. Yet female fictional detectives appear as both paid professionals and gifted amateurs; single, married, widowed; older spinsters and young adventurers; detecting for pleasure and to clear their own or a loved one's name. In choosing to create female detectives who were both varied and unusual, women writers confronted some of their own literary anxieties and ultimately were able to explore the ways they would create new routes to women’s authority within a male-dominated culture and specifically in the genre of detective fiction.
Teaching Crime Fiction
Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319906089
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
More than perhaps any other genre, crime fiction invites debate over the role of popular fiction in English studies. This book offers lively original essays on teaching crime fiction written by experienced British and international scholar teachers, providing vital insight into this diverse genre through a series of compelling subjects. Taking its starting-point in pedagogical reflections and classroom experiences, the book explores methods for teaching students to develop their own critical perspectives as crime fiction critics, the impact of feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism on crime fiction, crime fiction and film, the crime short story, postgraduate perspectives, and more.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319906089
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
More than perhaps any other genre, crime fiction invites debate over the role of popular fiction in English studies. This book offers lively original essays on teaching crime fiction written by experienced British and international scholar teachers, providing vital insight into this diverse genre through a series of compelling subjects. Taking its starting-point in pedagogical reflections and classroom experiences, the book explores methods for teaching students to develop their own critical perspectives as crime fiction critics, the impact of feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism on crime fiction, crime fiction and film, the crime short story, postgraduate perspectives, and more.
Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo
Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785278576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topics have been the subject of intense feminist scrutiny and campaigning, and the book demonstrates how this attention is reflected in contemporary crime fiction and its generic and thematic preoccupations. The book opens with a chapter presenting an overview of existing critical perspectives and feminist debates, demonstrating how fourth-wave feminist ideas and debates are inspiring innovations in the genre, as well as generating fresh ways of reading past and present crime fictions. Providing an overview and context for both fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, the chapter establishes the critical and cultural framework for its analysis. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodology and approach, detailing the contents of the chapters. Each of the five subsequent chapters uses critical vocabulary and concepts from feminism and the #MeToo movement to reassess canonical works and present new readings of contemporary crime fiction, producing compelling analyses of gender and genre. Canonical authors whose works are discussed include Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Val McDermid. Examining selected contemporary novels and short stories, the chapters in Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo provide fresh readings of both well-known and lesser-known crime authors. The contemporary authors whose work is examined are Lauren Henderson, Susan White, Jennifer Haigh, Allison Leotta, Y.A. Erskine, Heather Fitt, John Harvey, Dorothy Koomson, Pekka Hiltunen, Nekesa Afia, Michael Nava, Stella Duffy, Alex Reeve, V.T. Davy, and Dharma Kelleher. Through its critical examination of crime fiction, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo offers a powerful feminist analysis of the genre which draws links between literature and ongoing urgent social and cultural debates such as the #Metoo movement and fourth-wave feminism.
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785278576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topics have been the subject of intense feminist scrutiny and campaigning, and the book demonstrates how this attention is reflected in contemporary crime fiction and its generic and thematic preoccupations. The book opens with a chapter presenting an overview of existing critical perspectives and feminist debates, demonstrating how fourth-wave feminist ideas and debates are inspiring innovations in the genre, as well as generating fresh ways of reading past and present crime fictions. Providing an overview and context for both fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, the chapter establishes the critical and cultural framework for its analysis. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodology and approach, detailing the contents of the chapters. Each of the five subsequent chapters uses critical vocabulary and concepts from feminism and the #MeToo movement to reassess canonical works and present new readings of contemporary crime fiction, producing compelling analyses of gender and genre. Canonical authors whose works are discussed include Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Val McDermid. Examining selected contemporary novels and short stories, the chapters in Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo provide fresh readings of both well-known and lesser-known crime authors. The contemporary authors whose work is examined are Lauren Henderson, Susan White, Jennifer Haigh, Allison Leotta, Y.A. Erskine, Heather Fitt, John Harvey, Dorothy Koomson, Pekka Hiltunen, Nekesa Afia, Michael Nava, Stella Duffy, Alex Reeve, V.T. Davy, and Dharma Kelleher. Through its critical examination of crime fiction, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo offers a powerful feminist analysis of the genre which draws links between literature and ongoing urgent social and cultural debates such as the #Metoo movement and fourth-wave feminism.
Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction
Author: Glenwood Irons
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Names such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Sam Spade are perhaps better known than the names of the authors who created them. The woman detective has also had worldwide appeal; yet, with the exception of Christie's Miss Marple, the names of female detectives and their authors have only recently gained wide attention through the popularity of Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky. The essays in this collection grapple with a wide range of issues important to the female sleuth – the most important, perhaps, being the oft-heard challenge to her suitability for the job. Not surprisingly, gender issues are the main focus of all the essays; indeed, in detective novels with a woman protagonist, these issues are often right at the surface. Some of the papers see the female sleuth as an important force in popular fiction, but many also challenge the notion that the woman detective is a positive model for feminists. They argue that fictional female sleuths have lost the `otherness' that a feminine approach to the genre should encourage. Collectively, the essays also reveal the differences between British and American perspectives on the woman detective.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Names such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Sam Spade are perhaps better known than the names of the authors who created them. The woman detective has also had worldwide appeal; yet, with the exception of Christie's Miss Marple, the names of female detectives and their authors have only recently gained wide attention through the popularity of Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky. The essays in this collection grapple with a wide range of issues important to the female sleuth – the most important, perhaps, being the oft-heard challenge to her suitability for the job. Not surprisingly, gender issues are the main focus of all the essays; indeed, in detective novels with a woman protagonist, these issues are often right at the surface. Some of the papers see the female sleuth as an important force in popular fiction, but many also challenge the notion that the woman detective is a positive model for feminists. They argue that fictional female sleuths have lost the `otherness' that a feminine approach to the genre should encourage. Collectively, the essays also reveal the differences between British and American perspectives on the woman detective.
Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction
Author: P. Bedore
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137288655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137288655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.
American Mystery and Detective Novels
Author: Larry Landrum
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313003270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Mystery and detective novels are popular fictional genres within Western literature. As such, they provide a wealth of information about popular art and culture. When the genre develops within various cultures, it adopts, and proceeds to dominate, native expressions and imagery. American mystery and detective novels appeared in the late nineteenth century. This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction. The guide is divided into five major sections: a brief history, related genres, criticism, authors, and reference. This organization accounts for the literary history and types of novels stemming from the mystery and detective genre. A chronology provides a helpful overview of the development and transformation of the genre.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313003270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Mystery and detective novels are popular fictional genres within Western literature. As such, they provide a wealth of information about popular art and culture. When the genre develops within various cultures, it adopts, and proceeds to dominate, native expressions and imagery. American mystery and detective novels appeared in the late nineteenth century. This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction. The guide is divided into five major sections: a brief history, related genres, criticism, authors, and reference. This organization accounts for the literary history and types of novels stemming from the mystery and detective genre. A chronology provides a helpful overview of the development and transformation of the genre.
Detective Agency
Author: Priscilla L. Walton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520921467
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. Addressing the ways that Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and others work through the conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre made popular by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, the authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed. Issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women's detective novels, the authors show, and female sleuths face many of the same dilemmas as those who read about them—everyday problems with relationships, parenting, and money. Detective Agency also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the "industry" of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520921467
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. Addressing the ways that Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and others work through the conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre made popular by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, the authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed. Issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women's detective novels, the authors show, and female sleuths face many of the same dilemmas as those who read about them—everyday problems with relationships, parenting, and money. Detective Agency also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the "industry" of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.
German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction
Author: Faye Stewart
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786478454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
A marriage of mystery fiction and queer concerns, queer crime literature celebrates the pairing of the political and the sexual. Queer crime fiction is a subgenre in which sex, gender and sexuality are among the mysteries to be solved. Its writers use boundary-crossing identities and desires to express social critique, inviting readers to interpret queer narratives as literary incursions into cultural traditions. From androgynous investigators and serial killer housewives to closeted lesbians and transgendered lovers, the characters in queer mysteries are metaphors for changing social and political relations. This book reads German-language crime stories as allegories about 20th- and 21st-century upheavals, raising questions about human behavior and justice, the horrors of extremism, the changing shape of the nation, and the possibilities of democracy. Anchored in the historical contexts of protest cultures and countercultures of the last three decades, this study examines novels by popular feminist writers Pieke Biermann, Edith Kneifl and Ingrid Noll, and unexplored works by Susanne Billig, Gabriele Gelien, Corinna Kawaters, Katrin Kremmler, Christine Lehmann and Martina-Marie Liertz. An analysis of recent debates through the lens of genre fiction serves as the foundation for telling the cultural history of contemporary Germany, Austria and Europe as a whole from a new perspective.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786478454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
A marriage of mystery fiction and queer concerns, queer crime literature celebrates the pairing of the political and the sexual. Queer crime fiction is a subgenre in which sex, gender and sexuality are among the mysteries to be solved. Its writers use boundary-crossing identities and desires to express social critique, inviting readers to interpret queer narratives as literary incursions into cultural traditions. From androgynous investigators and serial killer housewives to closeted lesbians and transgendered lovers, the characters in queer mysteries are metaphors for changing social and political relations. This book reads German-language crime stories as allegories about 20th- and 21st-century upheavals, raising questions about human behavior and justice, the horrors of extremism, the changing shape of the nation, and the possibilities of democracy. Anchored in the historical contexts of protest cultures and countercultures of the last three decades, this study examines novels by popular feminist writers Pieke Biermann, Edith Kneifl and Ingrid Noll, and unexplored works by Susanne Billig, Gabriele Gelien, Corinna Kawaters, Katrin Kremmler, Christine Lehmann and Martina-Marie Liertz. An analysis of recent debates through the lens of genre fiction serves as the foundation for telling the cultural history of contemporary Germany, Austria and Europe as a whole from a new perspective.