Andrew K. Nestingen. Violence and Crime Fiction. In progress.
How are violence, crime fiction, and our social worlds related? While literary and cinematic crime fiction is filled with violence, we tend to think of its violence as mythologized and genre bound. Yet, at the same time, crime fiction has historically come to depict more violence more graphically. It has also proved enduringly popular with readers and viewers. Reading Western crime ficiton in this book-project, I ask how the construction and representation of violence in crime fiction plays a role in the way we imagine individual and collective identities. I also ask how such violence-inflected representations figure in the ways we imagine, construct, and regulate our social worlds.