CALL FOR PAPERS
I am seeking papers for a proposed panel at the American Studies
Association annual conference, Hartford CT, October 16-19, 2003.
"Strikers, Communists, and Detectives"
This panel will examine the labor history of the detective story.
Allan Pinkerton's story collections of the 1870s and 80s championed
the Pinkerton National Detective Agency's staunch protection of the
interests of capitalism against "subversive" elements like "Strikers,
Communists, and Tramps" (the title of a 1878 Pinkerton volume). In
such accounts, and, later, in the pulp serial adventures of "Nat
Pinkerton" in the early 20th Century, the detective was dramatized as
a mysterious, if politically conservative, infiltrator of gangs and
labor organizations. To what extent is the detective genre
itself-especially in its popular incarnation in the form of dime
novels and magazine stories- complicit with the nationalist and
aggressively capitalist suppression of organized labor and the
"foreign" elements it seemed to represent? To what extent does the
detective genre resist this political orientation, providing, even
antithetically, a kind of popular history of American labor movements
and the violent struggles in which they engaged?
Papers that offer new critical approaches to the political and social
violence represented in the history of detective fiction will be
welcome: dime novels, "mysteries and miseries" of the city,
locked-room detective stories, hard-boiled thrillers, gangster
stories and films.
Please submit 300-word abstracts and brief vita by January 15, 2003
to jeburne@utk.edu.
Jonathan P. Eburne
Department of English
University of Tennessee
301 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-5401
-- Jonathan P. Eburne Department of English University of Tennessee 301 McClung Tower Knoxville TN 37966-0430jeburne@utk.edu eburne@sas.upenn.edu
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