Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective FictionDreams 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. |
Contents
The Original Plotmaker | 1 |
Reverse Type | 28 |
The Art of Framing Lies | 62 |
To Have Been Possessed | 95 |
The Great Work Remaining before Us | 131 |
Prescription Homicide? | 163 |
Dream within a Dream | 201 |
Notes | 215 |
| 233 | |
| 251 | |
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Common terms and phrases
African American antebellum Archer argues associated August Big Gold Dream bildungsroman Bird’s body calls Clair Enson classical detective fiction Conjure-Man contrast crime criminal culture death detection’s detective genre detective story detective’s devices dime novel dime-novel detective Dominicus Dreams for Dead Dupin economic ethnic Frimbo general’s genre’s Gold Bug Hagar’s Daughter hard-boiled Harlem Hawthorne Hawthorne’s Higginbotham’s Higginbotham’s Catastrophe Himes Himes’s Hopkins Hopkins’s human imaginative identification industrial interracial sociability Jewel Jupiter Jupiter’s Kickapoo Kidd’s Kimballton labor Lee’s Legrand literary man’s manumission master mechanisms metaphor metonymy modern Molly Maguires murder Musgrave Ritual Mysterious Stranger N’Gana narrative narrator Negro nineteenth century paradox past Pike Pike’s plot Poe’s police political Pompey Pompey’s printer’s protagonist race racial Rudolph Fisher Rue Morgue Rzepka Sheppard Lee slave slavery sleuth social South suggests Sumner takes tale temporal tion tive treasure turn Twain union violence W. E. B. DuBois workers