In addition to covering the "detective" fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, this collection of British and American crime fiction considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. Ranging over the last three centuries, it includes chapters on the analysis of crime in eighteenth-century literature; French and Victorian fiction; women and black detectives; crime on film and TV; and police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.
His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." Published in 1939, when Raymond Chandler was 50, this is the first of the Philip Marlowe novels. Its bursts of sex, violence, and explosively direct prose changed detective fiction forever. "She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full."
The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction
The Dialect of the Tribe offers fresh readings of such great novels as The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, Ulysses, and the Beckett trilogy which illustrate how complex attitudes toward the speech forms of language inform the most varied social, psychological, and aesthetic structures in modern fiction. Sabin explores the powerful tension in these writers between appreciation for the resources of common speech in English and contrary longings for a freedom associated with abstraction, system, and foreign or private language.
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Literary Collections / General; Fiction / Political; Fiction / Alternative History;
Oscar Mandel, Professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry, drama, essays, fiction, literary criticism, translation, and art history.
