The Street Was Mine

White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir

M Abbott author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan

Published:6th Feb '03

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Street Was Mine cover

Springer Book Archives

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

'Although more revisionist than feminist, this book does damage to white boys.' - A. Hirsch, Choice

ISBN: 9781349387878

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

246 pages

Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2002