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.

This book outlines the cultural and historical contexts in which crime fiction participates, surveying the ideas animating its study today.

About the Author
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).

Reviews
'Starting with the Puritans and continuing through to the present day, this collection comprises 25 original essays on American crime fiction, including film and television (The Sopranos and others). Raczkowski (Univ. of South Alabama) goes beyond the usual generic markers of crime fiction ...' Choice
'... this informed, substantive collection does leave us questioning the profiles and line-ups through which we more typically organize its important objects of inquiry. In this respect, the future histories of crime fiction seem well in hand.' Christopher P. Wilson, American Literary History



Book Information
ISBN 9781107131019
Author Chris Raczkowski
Format Hardback
Page Count 372
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 650g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 160mm * 25mm