"This grotesque position": Hard-boiled crime fiction and American literary culture.
Item
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Title
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"This grotesque position": Hard-boiled crime fiction and American literary culture.
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Identifier
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AAI9432361
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identifier
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9432361
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Creator
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McCann, Sean Joseph.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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This dissertation seeks to understand the emergence of a distinct "noir" aesthetic by examining hard-boiled fiction's unusual place in the publishing market and literary field of the U.S. between the wars. Specifically, hard-boiled writing emerges in the era's pulp magazines--a fraction of the publishing market descended from dime novels and targeted to working-class audiences. More importantly, though, the "noir" sensibility is fashioned at a moment when the diffusion of a consumer ethos, rising literacy, and a growing emphasis on the importance of education for social advancement are combining to fuel popular obsession with culture and refinement. Because of their distinct publishing features, pulp magazines find themselves cut off from this phenomenon. In the minds of the magazines' writers and editors, though, this marginal status is transmuted into a mark of virtue. Pulp figures come to imagine themselves outnumbered combatants against the evils they discover in a modernizing mass culture--consumerism, gentility, and middle-brow refinement.;Hard-boiled crime fiction is fashioned most forcefully by writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain who are able to turn this battle to their advantage. Using the pulp's disdain at middlebrow pretense as a catapult to fame and high-brow attention, these writers achieve a measure of literary respectability. They are, however, never secure in their acceptance, and they retain divided loyalties till the end of their careers. It is this dissertation's central contention that the "noir" aesthetic--built around lonely men who feel themselves trapped between threatening authority and an omnivorous underworld--has much to do with the uncertain position of these writers and their fiction's ambivalent status. The situation is exacerbated as pulp writers like David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Chester Himes adapt to the post-WWII paperback market and take the "noir" sensibility to new levels of extremity.;After grounding this argument in publishing and cultural history, the dissertation devotes individual chapters to the way the fiction's "grotesque position" is registered in three crucial thematic features of the genre: action and violent conflict, the city, and the femme fatale.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
