Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (New Americanists)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.24 (813 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822325942 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 384 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he 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. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s 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. 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 accompanied 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 will interest students and fans of
This really is a great read!! This is a great book to understand the relationship between crime fiction and the New Deal.
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. “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