Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Elusive Game

   • Anthony Dean Rizzuto

   Pages 1-9

3. A Sense of the Past: A Brisk Overview of Chivalry and Romance

   • Anthony Dean Rizzuto

   Pages 11-39

4. The Long Goodbye: World War I, Romantic Nostalgia, and Chivalry’s Endless Death

   • Anthony Dean Rizzuto

   Pages 41-55

5. Games with Knights: Philip Marlowe, Hardboiled Masculinity, and the Ungentle Negation of Romance

   • Anthony Dean Rizzuto

   Pages 57-87

6. Conclusion: The Mean Streets of the Dialectic

   • Anthony Dean Rizzuto

   Pages 89-95

7. Back Matter

   Pages 97-101

   PDF

Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry responds to the general consensus that Philip Marlowe represents a chivalric knight out of romance. The book argues that this commonplace reading requires a stunningly rosy rewriting of Marlowe, knighthood, chivalry, and romance. The book offers a history of the cultural politics of chivalry from the Middle Ages through British Romanticism to the modern United States, exposing the elitism, violent masculinism, racism, and ethno-national othering harbored within. Rizzuto also considers the survival of the chivalric ideology after World War I, and argues that the narrative of the Great War destroying chivalry rewrites the ghastly history of warfare. Touching on Chandler throughout these cultural histories, the book then directly confronts the question of knighthood and romance in the Marlowe novels. Rizzuto identifies an explicit rejection of romance in the service of hardboiled gender, class, and genre norms, including a seldom-remarked pattern of violence against women and sexual assault. The volume concludes by offering some ideas about Chandler’s motivations and the reception of the Marlowe novels.

• Crime Fiction
• Race and Ethnicity
• feminism
• Research on Racism, Anti-Semitism and Extremism
• chivalric literature
• romance
• detective fiction
• hard-boiled fiction
• Literature, Gender and Sexuality

• Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, USA

  Anthony Dean Rizzuto

Anthony Dean Rizzuto teaches English at Sonoma State University, USA. He spearheaded The Annotated Big Sleep, a critical edition that places Raymond Chandler’s first novel in its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. He has a PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and degrees in History and Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

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