American Literature'S War On Crime eBook

While the United States was building the worlds largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a tough-on-crime era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literatures War on Crime analyzes dozens of novelsfrom best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacksby authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past centurys most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fictionand how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.