scholarly journals David Goodis’s Noir Fiction: The American Dream’s Paralysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lance Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Noir Fiction

A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maysaa Husam Jaber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Schema ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Noir Fiction ◽  
The Way

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

Welty’s Moonlighting Detective

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-213
Author(s):  
Jacob Agner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Chester Himes ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Dashiell Hammett ◽  
Noir Fiction

This essay argues that Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story, “The Demonstrators,” casts a spotlight on the “crime” of systemic racism in the U.S. South through the popular crime genre of American noir fiction and film. Although a mid-twentieth-century category mainly recognized for its depictions of dark cities and shadowy “mean streets,” noir’s stylized world collides with the Closed Society in Welty’s late story and throws into stark relief the subtler effects of white supremacy. Turning noir’s key traits on their head (e.g., black-and-white chiaroscuro lighting, the femme fatale, and the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction), Welty throughout “The Demonstrators” brilliantly illuminates the subtle tactics of, and clues left behind by, criminalized acts of whiteness. In so doing, Welty’s masterful crime story pays homage to classic noir artists such as Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and Alfred Hitchcock.

scholarly journals Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Claudia Bernardi
Keyword(s):  
Female Desire ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Noir Fiction ◽  
Romance Narratives

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.

scholarly journals Introduction: Exile and Social Transformation

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Allatson ◽  
Jo McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Times ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Noir Fiction

This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of Portal on exile and its potential to effect social change. The critical and creative discussions that follow this introduction respond to a particular set of problems. What factors permit and preclude exilic individual and communal transformation? Is there a need to rethink exilic agency in accord with local times, cultures and places, and to refocus attention on exile communal impacts on a host society? And, in a globalized epoch characterized by mass population movements across geopolitical lines, do states and national desires still have key roles to play in the production of exile? There are no straightforward answers to these questions, but all gesture toward the inadequacy of a single overarching definition or description of exile. Indeed, the process of exile has generated a great deal of debate regarding to whom the term exile applies and when. Furthermore, a number of unresolved issues recur in the extensive literature on the topic: the problematic location of exile and its definitional dependency on a home or homeland; the multivalent struggles to attain and maintain exilic voice, representation, memory, and identity on many fronts (individual, familial, communal, national, transnational); exile’s uneasy relation to modernity, the state, and globalization; and exile’s conceptual competition with other terms, such as diaspora, exodus, refugee and migrant. Intended as a selective reprise of these issues and the ways the contributors to this issue have responded to them, this introduction identifies some of the claims that have been made of exile as a space or mode of social transformation, as well as the possible limits of such claims. This article has been cited in the following: Ravn, Tine. Burmesiske flygtninge i Danmark: personlige narrativer omkring identitet, tilhørsforhold og integration. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Aalborg Universitet, Denmark, 2009. Smith, Carolyn. “Trial by Space; In Memory of My Mother.” Project Mimique (London), Feb. 27, 2008: http://www.projectmimique.org.uk/1-19.HTM. Mikula, Maja. “Displacement and Shifting Geographies in the Noir Fiction by Cesare Battisti,” Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique 6.2 (Juin 2007): http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/vol6_no2/fr/main_fr.html

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