African American detective fiction has not been consistently examined as a complete body of work nor has it been analyzed for its cultural differences and its important contribution to African American studies. The earliest authors and dates of black detective writing have been ignored or mis-stated by critical theorists. The Blues Detective surveys African American detective fiction from its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century up through the postmodern period of the 1970s. The writers studied in this work include Pauline Hopkins, J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. After a preliminary discussion of detective fiction in general, the author examines the ways in which black detective fiction differs from the traditional Euro-American genre. African American detective writers utilized detective fiction for their own ends, transforming both classical and hardboiled detective genres through the use of the four tropes of black detective fiction: altered detective personas, double-conscious detection, black vernaculars and hoodoo. The use of these four tropes by black detective writers was initiated at the very beginning of black detective writing. The author shows how these four tropes were handled by each successive black detective writer in their works. In the process African American detective writers created a tradition of black detective writing that transformed both the style and content of Euro-American detective fiction, expressing important social and political aspects of African American consciousness and culture in their creative use of a popular culture form. The author finds that black detective writing is an important aspect of black literary expression and that its influence has continued into the contemporary period.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9033 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Soitos, Stephen Francis |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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