Places for dead bodies: Race,labor,and detection in American literature.

详细信息   

• 作者：Robinson ; Miriam Michelle.
• 学历：Ph.D.
• 年：2011
• 导师：Matthews, John T.,eadvisor
• 毕业院校：Boston University
• ISBN：9781124297347
• CBH：3430421
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：17333284
• Pages：358

文摘

Critics have often characterized detective fiction as an exercise in rationalizing state power that depends on the puzzle-solving prowess of a mastermind recruited to defend middle class interests. By contrast, this dissertation argues that in the antebellum period, at the turn of the twentieth century, and during the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Era, detective fiction supplied American authors with a mode of counter-hegemonic performance, a means of unearthing those bodies that were the concealed foundation for liberal democracy and American prosperity. Defining "genre" as a formal framework that shifts over time, a market-oriented phenomenon, and an ideological contract that relies on audience recognition and engagement, this dissertation demonstrates that developments in the genre of detective fiction intersected with major shifts in the construction of race identities and the regulation of bodies and economies in the United States. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that early nineteenth-century fictions by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert M. Bird anticipated the genres initial codes and conventions even as they worked to reconcile tensions in a body politic fractured by slaveocracy and a system of "Sambo-making" in the South, a burgeoning industrial-corporate economy in the North, and the theft of Native American lands. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 study the ways that early detective novels offered psychological adjustment to the irrationality of late nineteenth-century global financial arrangements, the erratic tempo of industrial life, and the bewildering geography of modernity. Examining turn-of-the-century works by Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and others, I argue that these texts drew upon elements of detective fiction such as the "locked-room" puzzle and the principle of "backwards construction" to consider how expanded notions of civic recognition and government-by-consent paradoxically coexisted with the growth of U.S. imperialism and new regimes of involuntary, uncompensated servitude. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the presence of the detective in mid-twentieth century novels by Chester Himes and John Kennedy Toole. I show that Himes and Toole foreground the interpretive strategies and narrative authority of the detective figure, whose exertions make it possible to discern the relationship between economic violence, civic dispossession, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights.