Detective Agency
Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 31. May 1999
Book
Hardback
327 pages
978-0-520-21507-8 (ISBN)
Description
Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs.Addressing the ways that Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and others work through the conventions of the 'hard-boiled' genre made popular by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, the authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed. Issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women's detective novels, the authors show, and female sleuths face many of the same dilemmas as those who read about them - everyday problems with relationships, parenting, and money."
Detective Agency" also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the 'industry' of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.
Detective Agency" also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the 'industry' of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.
More details
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
5 figures
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
635 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-21507-8 (9780520215078)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Priscilla L. Walton is Professor of English at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels (1995) and The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (1992). Manina Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of That Art of Difference: 'Documentary-Collage' and English-Canadian Writing (1993).
Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Private Eye and the Public: Professional
Women Detectives and the Business of Publishing
2. Gumshoe Metaphysics:
Reading Popular Culture and Formula Fiction
3. Does She or Doesn't She?:
The Problematics of Feminist Detection
4. The Text as Evidence: Linguistic Subversions
5. Private I: Viewing (through) the (Female) Body
6. Plotting against the Law: Outlaw Agency
7. "She's Watching the Detectives":
The Woman PI in Film and Television
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Private Eye and the Public: Professional
Women Detectives and the Business of Publishing
2. Gumshoe Metaphysics:
Reading Popular Culture and Formula Fiction
3. Does She or Doesn't She?:
The Problematics of Feminist Detection
4. The Text as Evidence: Linguistic Subversions
5. Private I: Viewing (through) the (Female) Body
6. Plotting against the Law: Outlaw Agency
7. "She's Watching the Detectives":
The Woman PI in Film and Television
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index