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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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Unwilling Executioner - Crime Fiction and the State (Paperback)
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Unwilling Executioner - Crime Fiction and the State (Paperback)
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What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes
it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique?
Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging
genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic
state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once
the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This
study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence
and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely
transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of
criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early
eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness,
diversity, and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations
of crime and policing-moving from France and Britain and from
continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the
globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime
novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their
national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as
either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also
argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin,
Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjoewall
and Wahloeoe to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and
shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their
time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels
exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or
parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account
of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system
and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and
how society is policed and for whose benefit.
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