Cart
Free Shipping in the UK
Proud to be B-Corp

Violent Minds Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)

Violent Minds By Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)

Violent Minds by Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)


£8.50
New RRP £83.99
Condition - Very Good
Only 1 left

Summary

A surprising number of modernist novels are intensely preoccupied with the representation of criminality. This original study examines a diverse range of British and American authors who drew upon early criminology, detective fiction, and journalism to develop their ideas of the criminal as a complex, modern psychology.

Violent Minds Summary

Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal by Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)

Just as cultural attitudes toward criminality were undergoing profound shifts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist authors became fascinated by crime and its perpetrators, as well as the burgeoning genre of crime fiction. Throughout the period, a diverse range of British and American novelists took the criminal as a case study for experimenting with forms of psychological representation while also drawing on the conventions of crime fiction in order to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the criminal mind. Matthew Levay traces the history of that attention to criminal psychology in modernist fiction, placing understudied authors like Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith in dialogue with more canonical contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Dashiell Hammett, and Gertrude Stein. Levay demonstrates criminality's pivotal role in establishing quintessentially modernist forms of psychological representation and brings to light modernism's deep but understudied connections to popular literature, especially crime fiction.

Violent Minds Reviews

'Levay's Violent Minds is an ambitious, complex, and persuasive argument for the centrality of crime to some of the core projects of modernism ... erudite and evocative, it combines rigorous overviews of important scholarship on modernism/modernity with highly insightful and suggestive readings of individual modernist texts.' Christopher Raczkowski, Modern Philology
'A major virtue of the book is its multisided approach to the collocation of modernism and crime or criminality ... Violent Minds is the kind of book that reaches beyond its own corpus of fictional works to make us, as readers, reconsider our settled assumptions about genre, style, and popularity.' Paul Sheehan, Modern Language Quarterly
'Matthew Levay's scholarly yet highly readable first book, Violent Criminals: Modernism and the Criminal, is sure to appeal to students of the novel, modernism, and popular fiction alike.' Nic Panagopoulos, Joseph Conrad Today
'... this book ... does a remarkable job in pairing literary criticism with the historical study of criminology, and thus opens up a new way of approaching the psychological aspects of crime fiction, particularly with respect to literary modernism.' Audrey Chan, Crime Fiction Studies
'Excitingly, Levay works not only on canonical modernism, whose analysis allows Levay to uncover 'criminality's pivotal role in establishing quintessentially modernist forms of psychological representation', but also on crime fiction itself, analysing figures like Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Dashiell Hammett as writers of a 'popular modernism' ...' Year's Work in English Studies

About Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)

Matthew Levay is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University. His research focuses on twentieth-century literature, with emphases in modernism, the history and theory of the novel, literary genres, and popular print culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernist Cultures, MLQ, and the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Modernist detection: minds, mindlessness, and the logic of criminal pursuit; 2. Criminal types: anarchism, terrorism, and the violence of chance; 3. The modernist crime novel: popular literature and the forms of experiment; 4. Cases of identity: late modernism and the life of crime; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Additional information

GOR012729814
9781108428866
110842886X
Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal by Matthew Levay (Idaho State University)
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
20190103
248
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Violent Minds