The Street Was Mine
White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
Published:6th Feb '03
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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