A History of American Crime Fiction

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

Introduction Christopher Raczkowski; Part I. Early American Era: 1. From sermon to story: early American crime literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams; 2. The theft of authorship: crime narrative in post-revolutionary early American literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams; Part II. Romantic Era: 3. Crime journalism and the urban Gothic novel Matthew Warner Osborn; 4. Crime and American romanticism Timothy Helwig; 5. The Dark transactions of a Black? Slave narratives in the crime literature tradition Jeannine Marie DeLombard; 6. Edgar Allan Poe and the emergence of the literary detective Paul Grimstad; Part III. Realist Era: 7. The rise of the professional detective and the dime detective Pamela Bedore; 8. Home and away: reinvestigating domestic detective fiction Jon Blandford; 9. The rise of the American woman detective: gender and the detective genre in Green, Doyle, and Rinehart Ellen Burton Harrington; 10. Crime, science, realism John Dudley; Part IV. Modernist Era: 11. Criminal modernism Christopher Raczkowski; 12. American golden age crime fiction Malcah Effron; 13. Red Harvest: hard-boiled crime fiction and the fate of left populism Justus Nieland; 14. Stateless mothers/motherless states: the femme fatale on the threshold of American citizenship Paula Rabinowitz; 15. One of us: the emergence of the psychopathological protagonist Frederick Whiting; Part V. Postmodernist Era: 16. Unusual suspects: American crimes, metaphysical detectives, postmodernist genres Susan Elizabeth Sweeney; 17. Identity politics and crime fiction Michael Millner; 18. American detective fiction and settler colonialism James H. Cox; 19. African American crime and detective fiction Justin Gifford; 20. Criminal family drama before and after The Sopranos Dean DeFino; 21. Making murderers: the evolution of true crime Jean Murley; 22. Spy narratives in post 9/11 American culture Andrew Pepper; 23. Film noir and neo-noir Will Scheibel; 24. Crime fiction television David Bianculli; 25. Dead reckonings: theoretical and critical approaches to detective fiction Christopher Breu.

Chris Raczkowski is associate professor of English at the University of South Alabama. His work on American literature and culture has appeared in numerous academic journals and anthologies and he is currently at work on a manuscript on modernism and crime titled, sensibly enough, Criminal Modernism (forthcoming).