Violent minds : modernism and the criminal / Matthew Levay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levay, Matthew, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Crime in literature.

Criminals in literature.

Modernism (Literature)--England.

Modernism (Literature).

England.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

United States.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

ix, 239 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Just as cultural attitudes toward criminality were undergoing profound shifts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist authors became fascinated by crime and its perpetrators, as well as the burgeoning genre of crime fiction. Throughout the period, a diverse range of British and American novelists took the criminal as a case study for experimenting with forms of psychological representation while also drawing on the conventions of crime fiction in order to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the criminal mind. Matthew Levay traces the history of that attention to criminal psychology in modernist fiction, placing understudied authors like Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith in dialogue with more canonical contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Dashiell Hammett, and Gertrude Stein. Levay demonstrates criminality's pivotal role in establishing quintessentially modernist forms of psychological representation and brings to light modernism's deep but understudied connections to popular literature, especially crime fiction"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Modernist detection: minds, mindlessness, and the logic of criminal pursuit; 2. Criminal types: anarchism, terrorism, and the violence of chance; 3. The modernist crime novel: popular literature and the forms of experiment; 4. Cases of identity: late modernism and the life of crime; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781108428866

110842886X

OCLC:

1081337774