Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Lib

Description: Gumshoe America by Sean McCann Offers an account of the crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, the author contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In "Gumshoe America" Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-20th-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-20th-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. "Gumshoe America" traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crime fiction from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using the forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine "Black Mask" to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early 20s, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genres conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time.Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammetts career, McCann shows how Hammetts writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandlers fiction, unlike Hammetts idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback - Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford - are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy.Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accomplished the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, "Gumshoe America" should interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture and government. Notes Sees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal. Back Cover "The secret history of American crime fiction doubles back to the 1920s and 1930s American left. The noir novelists of Sean McCanns shrewd and disturbingGumshoe Americadevised a fierce, experimental pop-Modernism, an intransigent anti-popular strain within popular culture. McCann writes passionately, argumentatively, authoritatively, alert to both accomplishment and loss. Probably no prior study of American crime fiction is more entangled in the claims and contradictions of community, race, class, and politics."-Robert Polito, author ofSavage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson Author Biography Sean McCann is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Table of Contents Acknowledgments viiUncivil Society: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Idea of a Democratic Culture 11. Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction 392. "Mystic Rigmarole": Dashiell Hammett and the Realist Critique of Liberalism 873. The Pulp Writer as Vanishing American: Raymond Chandlers Decentralist Imagination 1404. Letdown Artists: Paperback Noir and the Procedural Republic 1985. Tangibles: Chester Himes and the Slow Death of New Deal Populism 251Conclusion: Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves 306Notes 309Bibliography 349Index 365 Review "McCann brilliantly shows how depictions of detectives and deadbeats were at one and the same time struggles over the terms of New Deal liberalism/postwar Keynesianism and inquiries into the cultural office of popular narrative. Gumshoe America ought to earn McCann a visible and enduring place as a premier scholar of popular American writing and an exponent of original ideas about literary value, U.S. cultural politics, and the ruses of representation in a variety of American cultural locations."—Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class"Sean McCanns Gumshoe America is a major new interpretation of a pivotal period in American social and cultural history—and also a pleasure to read. McCann blends sophisticated analysis of national politics, an understanding of cultural and political theory, detailed archival research in the concrete details of pulp literary production, and subtle critical analysis of literary texts."—Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation"The secret history of American crime fiction doubles back to the 1920s and 1930s American left. The noir novelists of Sean McCanns shrewd and disturbing Gumshoe America devised a fierce, experimental pop-Modernism, an intransigent anti-popular strain within popular culture. McCann writes passionately, argumentatively, authoritatively, alert to both accomplishment and loss. Probably no prior study of American crime fiction is more entangled in the claims and contradictions of community, race, class, and politics."—Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson Promotional Sees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal. Review Quote "The secret history of American crime fiction doubles back to the 1920s and 1930s American left. The noir novelists of Sean McCanns shrewd and disturbing Gumshoe America devised a fierce, experimental pop-Modernism, an intransigent anti-popular strain within popular culture. McCann writes passionately, argumentatively, authoritatively, alert to both accomplishment and loss. Probably no prior study of American crime fiction is more entangled in the claims and contradictions of community, race, class, and politics."-Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson Promotional "Headline" Sees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal. Details ISBN0822325942 Author Sean McCann Short Title GUMSHOE AMER-PB Pages 384 Series New Americanists Language English ISBN-10 0822325942 ISBN-13 9780822325949 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2000 Imprint Duke University Press Subtitle Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism Place of Publication North Carolina Country of Publication United States Publisher Duke University Press DOI 10.1604/9780822325949 UK Release Date 2000-12-06 AU Release Date 2000-12-06 NZ Release Date 2000-12-06 US Release Date 2000-12-06 Publication Date 2000-12-06 DEWEY 813.087209358 Audience Professional & Vocational We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:131532429;

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