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Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre’s puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America.
The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction’s puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.
The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction’s puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published April 28, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 12, 2018
★★★☆☆ | 3 Stars
This is a dense, opaquely written work that will be difficult if not impossible for anyone without an academic background to understand. Especially in the early chapters of the book, the language obscures rather than illuminates the points Robinson is trying to make. The later chapters of this book are more successful. These are written in (slightly) more accessible language (or perhaps I just became more used to Robinson's writing style?). I also feel that the points she was trying to make were stronger and more directly linked to the texts she was examining. I think this was mostly due to the texts she selected to examine in these later chapters in comprison to the ones she examined in the earlier chapters.
Overall, Robinson makes some interesting observations and critiques of peripheral American detective fiction but it's a shame most of these get lost in mountains of academic jargon.
This is a dense, opaquely written work that will be difficult if not impossible for anyone without an academic background to understand. Especially in the early chapters of the book, the language obscures rather than illuminates the points Robinson is trying to make. The later chapters of this book are more successful. These are written in (slightly) more accessible language (or perhaps I just became more used to Robinson's writing style?). I also feel that the points she was trying to make were stronger and more directly linked to the texts she was examining. I think this was mostly due to the texts she selected to examine in these later chapters in comprison to the ones she examined in the earlier chapters.
Overall, Robinson makes some interesting observations and critiques of peripheral American detective fiction but it's a shame most of these get lost in mountains of academic jargon.
Displaying 1 of 1 review