Description
Book SynopsisJames Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown's Requiem in 1981, Ellroy's eccentric Demon Dog persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy's fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy's two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy's fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse peeping tom into a recognizable, contemporary social type, a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the dece
Trade ReviewJames Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction is an important work which draws you into the mind's eye of the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. By engaging with existing critical material and forging a new path in readings of Ellroy, Nathan Ashman has earned a place in the front rank of Ellroy scholars. -- Steven Powell, University of Liverpool
Nathan Ashman's book is a welcome and valuable addition to the growing body of critical work on James Ellroy and the type of historical crime fiction he writes. Well-written, carefully researched, theoretically informed and textually astute, it provides a reading of Ellroy's most important fiction that focuses on the obsessive voyeurism at their core, and the desire for knowledge, both of individual crimes and their relation to the larger public sphere, that it signifies. This is an important contribution both to our knowledge of Ellroy's work and to crime fiction studies in general. -- Professor Peter Messent, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK
Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘Cam-Era’: James Ellroy, Voyeurism and Contemporary Culture Chapter 1: ‘Cherchez la Femme’: Voyeurism, Narrative Desire and the Female Body in The Black Dahlia Chapter 2: ‘They’ll Believe Anything We Can Get on the Screen’: Cinematizing the City in The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential Chapter 3: ‘Feast Your Eyes’: White Jazz, Voyeurism and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism Chapter 4: ‘Window Peeping History’: Voyeurising the Past in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand Chapter 5: ‘You Can’t Peep and Prowl Paper the Rest of Your Life’: Blood’s a Rover, Public Privacy and the Voyeuristic Pleasures of the Archive Conclusion: Connecting THEN and NOW: Perfidia, LAPD 53 and the Value of Ellroy’s ‘Voyeur Fiction’
