This illuminating book makes the case for a tradition of African American detective fiction--novels written by black Americans about black detectives and incorporating distinctly African American tropes and themes. Beginning with Pauline Hopkins in 1901, black authors consciously altered and subverted the formulas of detective fiction in significant ways. Such writers as J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major created a new genre that responded to the social and political concerns of the black community.Examining the work of these authors, Stephen Soitos frames his analysis in terms of four uniquely African American tropes: altered detective personas, double-consciousness detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo. He argues that black writers created sleuths who were in fact \"blues detectives,\" engaged not only in solving crimes, but also in exploring the mysteries of black life and culture.Soitos grounds his study in African American literary theory, particularly the work of Houston Baker, Bernard Bell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He offers both a new way of conceiving black detective fiction and a series of insightful readings of books in this genre.

The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction

Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Paul Auster's Intratext Uncontainable Assemblages "Thinging" Things Chapter 1: Smoke that Means the Entire World The Writer's Prosthetic Cigarette The Gathering of the Tobacco Shop Smoke is the Story Itself Chapter 2: The Story of the Typewriter Typewriter Associations The Typewriter-Assemblage Rhizomatic Typewriting The Machinic Muse Chapter 3: Doubles and Disappearances The Birth of the Double The Double Functions of the Double The Doppelganger in the Other Sex Double Game, and the Mingling of Texts Gotham Handbook Chapter 4: New York, Where All Quests Fail In Search of Auster's City In Austeralia Discovering the Notebooks Encountering the Writer Inconclusion Notes Bibliography Copyright Permissions Index

Paul Auster's Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With

(1995) Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol 37, No 1, pp 17-33

Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

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Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

(1990). Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 71-84.

Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction

Whitehead's often humorous novel about elevator inspectors is also a serious examination of textual authority in relation to issues of race, identity, and history. Set in an imagined past, The Intuitionist presents itself as antidetective fiction: a revision of American history and the detective genre. The novel's allusions to other literary predecessors, however, and its references to various hoaxes and deceptions indicate a complex investigation of literacy, inscription, and interpretation. Similar to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Whitehead's racial allegory bears a closer relationship to Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Recalibrating the Past: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist

compact nature, a triumph in condensing so much social history in such an efficient and breezy read. This brevity and precision made the work accessible to the general public and undergraduate students alike. The book’s sequel, however, revels in its excess of information and analysis, resulting in its six hundred pages of text and another two hundred pages of endnotes. This not only pushes the work beyond what can typically be assigned in the classroom but also makes it difficult to glean the more important lessons that are subtly embedded within the work. It is more difficult for the reader to find the primary points when surrounded by so much material. One of his generation’s best historians of antiquarians, Gross has grown closer to antiquarianism himself. Yet these are issues often inherent in classic texts when cultivated over an entire career. Transcendentalists and Their World is a landmark work in social history that will serve as a resource for all historians of nineteenth-century America and scholarly model for generations to come.

Alison Russell

Papers

Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction

Recalibrating the Past: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form