Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled’ crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and true crime’, crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of senseless’ murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Eugene McNulty is Lecturer in English at St Patrick’s College (Dublin City University), Ireland. His publications include Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (2008).

Patricia Pulham is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (2006), and co-editor of stories by Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (2006) and of Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (2006).