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Palgrave Macmillan

The Street Was Mine

White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Authors:
  1. Megan E. Abott
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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 1-19

  3. “I Can Feel Her”

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 21-64

  4. “Another Soft-Voiced Big Man I Had Strangely Liked”

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 65-89

  5. The Woman in White

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 91-123

  6. “Nothing You Can’t Fix”

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 125-154

  7. “The Strict Domain of Whitey”

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 155-189

  8. Epilogue

    • Megan E. Abott
    Pages 191-199

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 201-246
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Keywords

About this book

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

Reviews

'Although more revisionist than feminist, this book does damage to white boys.' - A. Hirsch, Choice

About the author

MEGAN ABBOTT is Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York-Oswego. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University in 2000.

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