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Louisiana State University

2005

Popular culture

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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 Iconography Of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, And American Nationalism, Dallas Hulsey Jan 2005

The Iconography Of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, And American Nationalism, Dallas Hulsey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Iconography of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, and American Nationalism develops a model of cultural icons, defining icons as highly visible, culturally variable, and overdetermined auratic images. Situating icons within the context of mass reproduction technologies and American nationalism, this study seeks to demystify the simple images presented by infantile, national, and scapegoat icons in literature, film, and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that icons participate in the American nationalist project by channeling citizens’ political and patriotic feelings through seemingly simple images. While acknowledging that icons are necessary to construct what Benedict Anderson calls “the imagined community” of the nation, …