Description
Book SynopsisAmerican crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes. This book argues that such novels are in fact psychologically complex and sophisticated works which demand that readers take responsibility for the images of masculinity that they project on to these works.
Trade ReviewMurdering Masculinities makes a sophisticated, substantial contribution to contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. It pays closer, more intelligent, and more sustained attention to the crime novels it considers than has been paid them before, and it not only engages an impressive range of psychoanalytic thinkers, but contributes significantly to the development and refinement of psychoanalytic theory. -- Tim Dean,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Sumptuous, elegant, nuanced, and accessible, Greg Forter's Murdering Masculinities helps us to remember what language can do. But Forter minces more than words in this provocative new book. He offers a transformative reading of American crime fiction, arguing that it is not to high modernism that we should look for the reinvention of gender, but rather to the ‘low' works of authors like James Cain, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and William Faulkner. -- Kaja Silverman
