Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and PostmodernismReading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century later, Le Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture. |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno adventure aesthetic alienation anarchists Baudrillard bourgeois British capitalism Carré character Christie Christie's Conrad consciousness contemporary Continental Op conventions crime fiction critical Crying of Lot Dashiell Hammett detective fiction detective figure detective novel detective stories dominant Doyle Dupin empire empiricism espionage fiction evaluation exists formal English novel Freud genre Glass Key Hammett's fiction hard-boiled fiction high modernism Holmes's human identity ideology imperial India individual Kipling Kipling's knowledge language Leamas literary literature Lukács Marx Marxism mass culture Miss Marple modernist moral Morstan mystery narrative novel of detection Poe's detective political popular culture popular fiction postmodern produced Purloined Letter Pynchon ratiocinative Raymond Williams reader realism reality relations represented Secret Agent sense Sherlock Holmes Sign of Four simulacra Sleeping Murder social society spy novel structure style subgenre suggests theory thriller tion tradition ultimately values Victorian writing York
Popular passages
Page 7 - To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world — and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.