Dreams for dead bodies : blackness, labor, and the corpus of American detective fiction / M. Michelle Robinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robinson, Michelle, 1979- author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

Class, culture.

Class : culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Detective and mystery stories, American--History and criticism.

Detective and mystery stories, American.

African Americans in literature.

Slavery in literature.

Working class in literature.

Work in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 pages)

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Dreams of Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and Detective Fiction in American Literature argues that the detective genre's lineage lies in unexpected texts: experimental works on the margins of what we recognize as classical detective fiction today. It shows that authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher drew on detective fiction's puzzle-elements to wrestle with complicated questions about race and labor in the United States, such that the emergence of detective fiction is itself bound to a history of interracial conflicts and labor struggles. Unlike previous studies of detective fiction, this book foregrounds an interracial genealogy of detective fiction, building a nuanced picture of the ways that both black and white American authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that finally coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction's puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.

Contents:

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: The Original Plotmaker; Chapter 1: Reverse Type; Chapter 2: The Art of Framing Lies; Chapter 3: To Have Been Possessed; Chapter 4: The Great Work Remaining before Us; Chapter 5: Prescription: Homicide?; Conclusion: Dream within a Dream; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-250) and index.

CC BY

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472900602

0472900609

9780472121816

0472121812

OCLC:

978389760

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.8749028

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access