Author: Kate Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476639752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Who decides what is right or wrong, ethical or immoral, just or unjust? In the world of crime and spy fiction between 1880 and 1920, the boundaries of the law were blurred and justice called into question humanity's moral code. As fictional detectives mutated into spies near the turn of the century, the waning influence of morality on decision-making signaled a shift in behavior from idealistic principles towards a pragmatic outlook taken in the national interest. Taking a fresh approach to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, this book examines how Holmes and his rival maverick literary detectives and spies manipulated the law to deliver a fairer form of justice than that ordained by parliament. Multidisciplinary, this work views detective fiction through the lenses of law, moral philosophy, and history, and incorporates issues of gender, equality, and race. By studying popular publications of the time, it provides a glimpse into public attitudes towards crime and morality and how those shifting opinions helped reconstruct the hero in a new image.
Author: John J. Han
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Mystery fiction as a genre renders moral judgments not only about detectives and criminals but also concerning the cultural structures within which these mysteries unfold. In contrast to other volumes which examine morality in crime fiction through the lenses of personal guilt and personal justice, Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction analyzes the effect of moral imagination on the moral structures implicit in the genre. In recent years, public awareness has attended to the relationship between social structures and justice, and this collection centers on how personal ethics and social ethics are bound together amidst the shifting moral landscapes of mystery fiction. Contributors discuss the interplay between personal guilt and social guilt – considering morality and justice on an individual level and at a societal level – using frameworks of certainty and ambiguity. They show how individual characters in works by Agatha Christie, Gabriel García Márquez, Natsuo Kirino, F.H. Batacan, and Stephen King, among others, may view their moral standing with certainty but clash with the established mores of their culture. Featuring essays on Japanese, Filipino, Indian, and Colombian mystery fiction, as well as American and British fiction, this volume analyzes social guilt and justice across cultures, showing how individuals grapple with the certainty, and, at times, the moral ambiguity, of their respective cultures.
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 164014093X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.
Author: Andrew Glazzard
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137559179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Detectives, police informers, spies and spymasters, anarchists and terrorists, swindlers: these are the character types explored in Conrad's Popular Fictions. This book shows how Joseph Conrad experimented creatively with genres such as crime and espionage fiction, and sheds new light on the sources and contexts of his work.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Canada
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.
Author: Anne Hiebert Alton
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
This collection of new essays applies a wide range of critical frameworks to the analysis of prolific fantasy author Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Essays focus on topics such as Pratchett's treatment of noise and silence and their political implications; art as an anodyne for racial conflict; humor and cognitive debugging; visual semiotics; linguistic stylistics and readers' perspectives of word choice; and Derrida and the "monstrous Regiment of Women." The volume also includes an annotated bibliography of critical sources. The essays provide fresh perspectives on Pratchett's work, which has stealthily redefined both fantasy and humor for modern audiences.
Author: John Walton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630826X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Private detectives and detective agencies played a major role in American history from 1870 to 1940. Pinkerton, Burns, Thiels, and the smaller independents were a multi-million dollar industry, hired out by many if not most American corporations, who needed services of surveillance, strike breaking, and labor espionage. Not only is John Walton's account the first sustained history of this industry, it is also the first book to trace the ways in which the private detective came to occupy a cherished place in popular imagination. Walton paints lively portraits of these mythical figures from Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant eccentric, to Sam Spade, the hard-boiled hero of Dashiell Hammett's best-selling tales. There's a great question lurking in here: how did pulp magazine editors shape the image of the hard-boiled private eye, and what sorts of interplay obtained between the actual records (agency files, memoirs) of these motley individuals in real life and the legend of the private detective in mass-market fiction? This history of the private eyes and this account of how the detective industry and the culture industry played off of each other is a first. Walton show us, in clean clear outline, the figure of the classical private eye, and he shows us further how the memory of this iconic figure was sustained in fiction, radio, film, literary societies, product promotions, adolescent entertainments, and a subculture of detective enthusiasts.
Author: Leslie J. Reagan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520387422
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come. When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law. With this edition, Leslie J. Reagan provides a new preface that addresses the dangerous and ongoing threats to abortion access across the country, and the precarity of our current moment. While abortions have typically been portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, this deeply researched history confirms that many abortion providers—including physicians—practiced openly and safely, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women could find cooperative and reliable practitioners; but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion increasingly under attack, this book remains the definitive history of abortion in the United States, offering vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.
Author: Megan Hoffman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137536667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This book provides an original and compelling analysis of the ways in which British women’s golden age crime narratives negotiate the conflicting social and cultural forces that influenced depictions of gender in popular culture in the 1920s until the late 1940s. The book explores a wide variety of texts produced both by writers who have been the focus of a relatively large amount of critical attention, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but also those who have received comparatively little, such as Christianna Brand, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. Through its original readings, this book explores the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in golden age crime fiction, and shows that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe’ solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.
Author: Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.
