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Louisiana State University

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

2005

American literature

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Feminist Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction As Political Protest In The Tradition Of Women Proletarian Writers Of The 1930s, Laura Ellen Ng Jan 2005

Feminist Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction As Political Protest In The Tradition Of Women Proletarian Writers Of The 1930s, Laura Ellen Ng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective fiction has been studied as an adaptation of the traditional masculine hard-boiled detective genre. Writers such as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller create compelling feminist protagonists to fill the role of detective. The successes and failures of these feminist detectives have then been measured against the standards created in the classic genre by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. The classic hard-boiled masculine genre came of age in the 1930s and 1940s at the same time as proletarian literature. The two genres share many characteristics including reliance upon first person narrative, the …


The Literary Frontier: Creating An American Nation (1820-1840), Tena Lea Helton Jan 2005

The Literary Frontier: Creating An American Nation (1820-1840), Tena Lea Helton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it might be easy to dismiss frontier literature as a minor historical anomaly, as a descriptor limited to setting, or as an insignificant variation from a country struggling to reach the heights of British fictional “norms.” However, when American literature began to flourish in the 1820s, it was primarily a literature of the frontier. Examining what this frontier quality means for literary elements beyond setting, such as narrative voice, textual structure, and genre, more clearly explains the importance of the frontier to literary nation-building. After all, the literary frontier ranged across literary genres, …