Violent Minds

Modernism and the Criminal

Matthew Levay

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108428866
• eBook ISBN: 9781108676366
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Just as cultural attitudestoward criminality were undergoing profound shifts in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, modernist authors became fascinated by crime and its perpetrators, as well as the burgeoning genre of crime fiction. Throughout the period, a diverse range of British and American novelists took the criminal as a case study for experimenting with forms of psychological representation while also drawing on the conventions of crime fiction in order to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the criminal mind. Matthew Levay traces the history of that attention to criminal psychology in modernist fiction, placing understudied authors like Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith in dialogue with more canonical contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Dashiell Hammett, and Gertrude Stein. Levay demonstrates criminality's pivotal role in establishing quintessentially modernist forms of psychological representation and brings to light modernism's deep but understudied connections to popular literature, especially crime fiction.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modernism’s Violent Minds
• Chapter 1 Modernist Detection: Minds, Mindlessness, and the Logic of Criminal Pursuit
• Chapter 2 Criminal Types: Anarchism, Terrorism, and the Violence of Chance
• Chapter 3 The Modernist Crime Novel: Popular Literature and the Forms of Experiment
• Chapter 4 Cases of Identity: Late Modernism and the Life of Crime
• Conclusion: The Criminal after Modernism
• Bibliography
• Index