The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
246 pages
|Published: 15 Nov 2002
|Editions
|Details
This edition
ISBN: 9780312294816
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date: 15 November 2002
Description
This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-’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. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.
