Description
Book SynopsisPresents a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War and World War II. This book shows how women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction. It focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition and the ways in which it reflected ideologies of domesticity and gender.
Trade Review“
The Web of Iniquity presents strikingly original research on an intriguing subject: the origins of the American detective novel in mid-nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Nickerson has hit upon a rich and absorbing subject. No other book has treated this area of women’s literary history in America.”—Gillian Brown, author of
Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America“A genuinely original, terrifically interesting book.”—Dana Nelson, author of
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White MenTable of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
The Advent of Detective Fiction and the Postbellum Period
1. "To Trace a Lie, to Discover a Disguisse" : Genres of Crime and Secrecy
2. "The Eye of Suspicion": The Erotics of Detection in The Dead Letter
3. The Loop of Surveillance in The Figure Eight and Hagar's Daughter
Anna Katharine Green and the Gilded Age
4. " A Woman with a Secret": Knowing and Telling in The Leavenworth Case
5. " A Woman's Hand": Good Works and the Woman Detective
Mary Roberts Rinehart and the Modern Era
6. "No Place for a Spinster" : The Architecture of Retrospection in The Circular Staircase
7. " I suppose They Stood It as Long as They Could": Mothers, Daughters, and Axe Murder in The Album
Afterword
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
