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OUT NOW:
Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality
By Fredric Jameson
The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novel
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2019-raymond-chandler
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Raymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler’s work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler’s invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighbourhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.
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“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” - Terry Eagleton
“Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today.” - Benjamin Kunkel, London Review of Books
“The most muscular of writers.” - Times Literary Supplement
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HARDBACK: JULY 2016 / 96 PAGES / ISBN 9781784782160 / $19.95 / £12.99 / $25.95CAN
AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2019-raymond-chandler
For more information on university inspection/desk copies visit: http://www.versobooks.com/pg/desk-copies
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