Genres of Privacy in Postwar America
eBook - ePub

Genres of Privacy in Postwar America

  1. 240 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Genres of Privacy in Postwar America

About this book

With this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia.

Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.

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Yes, you can access Genres of Privacy in Postwar America by Palmer Rampell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Social History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Series Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Introduction: Genres of Privacy
  8. 1. The Queer Art of Murder
  9. 2. Midcentury Black Cops
  10. 3. The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade
  11. 4. Exorcising Child Abuse in the 1970s
  12. 5. Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie
  13. Conclusion
  14. Acknowledgments
  15. Notes
  16. Index
  17. Series List