The big somewhere : essays on James Ellroy's noir world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The big somewhere : essays on James Ellroy's noir world
（Literary studies）
Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
- : hb
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-208) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
James Ellroy's identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy's early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy's life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction.
The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World is an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Flugge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels.
The 'Big Somewhere' is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
Part I: Genre and Literary Influences
1. "Tragic Power": The Influence of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett on the Work of James Ellroy
Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
2. "No Man's Land": Broken Men and Traumatized Police Officers in The Onion Field and The Black Dahlia
Jim Mancall (Wheaton College, USA)
Part II: Ellroy and Noir
3. "Capable of Anything": Dudley Smith's Role in Ellroy's L.A. Quartets
Anna Flugge (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)
4. "Geography is Destiny": Cinematising the City in the L.A. Quartet
Nathan Ashman (University of Surrey, UK)
Part III: "America was Never Innocent": Underworld and Government Power Structures
5. Between Althusser and Foucault: Power Relations in James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy
Ruben Peinado Abarrio (Independent Scholar)
6. Paradoxes of Race in the L.A. Quartet
Joshua Meyer (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
7. The Divine Violence of Underworld USA
Rodney Taveira (University of Sydney, Australia)
8. From Paranoia to the Contrary: Plotting the Noir World of James Ellroy
Woody Haut (Independent Scholar)
Part IV: Ellroy and After: The Ellrovian Influence on Authors and Genre
9. ''A Pointed Demythologization": The Influence of James Ellroy's Novels on Megan Abbott's Revisionism of the Femme Fatale
Diana Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
10. Individual and Institutionalised Corruption: The Influence of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet on the Novels of David Peace
David Bishop (Independent Scholar) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool, UK)
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
