[8], 200 pages. Some soiling along edge front edge. Includes Introduction;

[8], 200 pages. Some soiling along edge front edge. Includes Introduction; Preliminary Mappings: Modernism and Genre Fiction; Part 1: The Emergence of he modern detective Hero; Part II: Empire and Espionage: The "Great Game Begins; Part III: Modernists and Detectives; Part IV: Postmodern Crime Fiction. Also contains Conclusion: Postmodern Fictions of Crime; Works Cited; and Index. Jon Thompson is a Professor of English at North Carolina State University where he teaches courses in twentieth-century/contemporary American and British literature. He maintains a particular interest in contemporary poetry and poetics. He did his Ph.D. at LSU and then came as an Assistant Professor to the English Department at NCSU. Before the Ph.D., he took a B.A. and an M.A. at University College, Dublin (his Master's thesis was on the problem of communication in Robert Creeley's poetry). His current work comes out of his career as a poet, critic and editor. He is the founding editor of the international online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, launched in 2001 and also the editor of the single-author poetry series, Free Verse Editions, launched in 2005. Reading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century later, Le Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture.