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Description
In this study, Keli Masten advocates for a new approach to the study of popular fiction in the United States, positioning the detective story as an offshoot of the American Gothic and grounding its conflict in the social anxieties surrounding race, class, and gender in the US.
With deep roots in regional American Gothic literary traditions, detective fiction serves as a source of both macabre entertainment and a cultural critique of corruption and the abuse of power in the United States. Weaving together familiar elements like hostile environments, extreme jeopardy, and intuitive investigators, Masten contests that the way authors draw from multiple genres in American Gothic detective mysteries allows them to examine how the struggles between civility and savagery, authenticity and pretense, and order and chaos have evolved in response to regional American social values and concerns.
Across five chapters, Dark Logic features an influential representative author--Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katharine Green, Mark Twain, and Dashiell Hammett--and offers unique regional perspectives on transgressive crimes and their disentanglement. Readers will not only gain a deeper understanding of gothic detective fiction, but of how these stories serve as a dialogue between the society which created them and the society which consumes them, targeting the values and anxieties of American culture and preventing its people from achieving the tranquility they struggle to impose.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
1. “Called Forth by Imminent Dangers”: The Frontier Gothic Mysteries of Charles Brockden Brown
2. “An Absolute Legion of Oddities”: Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Urban Gothic
3. “Some Secret Object of Dread”: Anna Katharine Green and the Female Gothic Detective Story
4. “Natal Signatures”: The Odd Legalities of Mark Twain's Southern Gothic
5. “A Reasonable Amount of Trouble”: Dashiell Hammett's Lawless West Coast Gothic
Conclusion
References
Product details
| Published | Dec 24 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 192 |
| ISBN | 9781978760790 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 1 b/w illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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