Search results for ""Author Christopher P. Wilson""
The University of Chicago Press Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America
Whether they appear in mystery novels or headline news stories, on prime-time TV or the silver screen, few figures have maintained such an extraordinary hold on the American cultural imagination as modern police officers. Why are we so fascinated with the police and their power? What relation do these pervasive media representations bear to the actual history of modern policing? Christopher P. Wilson explores these questions by examining narratives of police power in crime news, popular fiction, and film, showing how they both reflect and influence the real strategies of law enforcement on the beat, in the squad room and in urban politics. He takes us from Theodore Roosevelt's year of reform with the 1890s NYPD to the rise of "community policing", from the classic "police procedural" film "The Naked City" to the best-selling novels of LAPD veteran Joseph Wambaugh. Wilson concludes by demonstrating the ways in which popular storytelling about police power has been intimately tied to the course of modern liberalism, and to the rising tide of neoconservatism today.
£28.78
University of Nebraska Press We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature
We Who Work the West examines literary representations of class, labor, and space in the American West from 1885 to 2012. Moving from María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s representations of dispossessed Californio ranchers in the mid-nineteenth century to the urban grid of early twentieth-century San Francisco in Frank Norris’s McTeague to working and unemployed cowboys in the contemporary novels of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, Kiara Kharpertian provides a panoramic look at literary renderings of both individual labor—physical, tangible, and often threatened handwork—and the epochal transformations of central institutions of a modernizing West: the farm, the ranchero, the mine, the rodeo, and the Native American reservation. The West that emerges here is both dynamic and diverse, its on-the-ground organization of work, social class, individual mobility, and collective belonging constantly mutating in direct response to historical change and the demands of the natural environment. The literary West thus becomes more than a locus of mythic nostalgia or consumer fantasy about the American past. It becomes a place where the real work of making that West, as well as the suffering and loss it often entailed, is reimagined.
£48.60
