American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History Of Nobrow Literature As Art
by Peter Swirski /
2016 / English / PDF
4.1 MB Download
Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that
expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its
authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in
which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed
literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining
literary standards. Asking, in effect, a series of questions about
the nature of genre fiction as art, successive chapters look at
American crime writers whose careers throw light on the hazards and
rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow
aesthetics: Dashiell Hammett, John Grisham, William Faulkner,
Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Nelson DeMille, and
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Peter Swirski looks at American crime fiction as an artform that
expresses and reflects the social and aesthetic values of its
authors and readers. As such he documents the manifold ways in
which such authorship and readership are a matter of informed
literary choice and not of cultural brainwashing or declining
literary standards. Asking, in effect, a series of questions about
the nature of genre fiction as art, successive chapters look at
American crime writers whose careers throw light on the hazards and
rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow
aesthetics: Dashiell Hammett, John Grisham, William Faulkner,
Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Nelson DeMille, and
F. Scott Fitzgerald.