Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s. The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text. In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s. The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text. In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

“The journalistic criminal novel” “In Cold Blood” by Truman Garcia Capote in the context of “new journalism” problem

The success of the ‟new journalism” in the United States in the 60s of the last century had an impact on the literary process. Truman Garcia Capote's novel ‟In Cold Blood” is an attempt to create a new form of fiction and nonfiction novel, which combines the features of nonfiction and journalism. So there is a genre of ‟criminal journalistic novel”. The author is involved in the investigation of a criminal case. The analysis reveals common typological features of a crime novel. Capote's approaches to the text are investigated, which are similar to journalistic professional methods – interview, reportage, essay. A comparison with previously published works was accomplished, which localises this novel in a different epoch at a new artistic level. The study also identifies the points of contacts and variances in the evaluation of the novel in Western and Russian criticism. The article offers conclusions. Capote's novel ‟In Cold Blood” allows to be focused not only on real criminal events, but also on the moral state of American society in the proposed time frame. The novel differs from the journalistic reportage, there is a special form of a work of art-a journalistic novel-investigation. The synthesis of literature and journalism also proved fruitful for Norman Kingsley Mailer 's nonfiction novels.

Zło patriarchatu. O Gniewie Zygmunta Miłoszewskiego jako kryminale zaangażowanym

This paper focuses on social commitment in crime fiction. Based on Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Rage, it discusses the theme of violence against women and that of the criticism of the victim support system. The author of this article proposes the name for a new literary genre – the committed crime novel.

A City of Betrayals: Irvine Welsh’s Minor Literature of Leith

This article examines the representation of the city and communities of Edinburgh in Irvine Welsh’s works, more specifically his Trainspotting saga: Trainspotting (1993), Porno (2002), Skagboys (2012) and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018). While Welsh is an integral part of a broader literary tradition of the contemporary urban Scottish novel, which blends together the crime novel genre with the localised concerns of post-industrialism, gripping poverty, Thatcherite austerity, substance abuse and nagging questions of Scottish identity (gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, etc.), his depictions of the former port-town of Leith and its forgotten histories exposes Edinburgh as two distinctly separate and striated communities and geographies: one of opportunity and one of betrayal. Specifically, this essay reads Welsh through the literary, spatial and political theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with regard to Leith’s contentious historical relationship with Edinburgh. In this analysis of Welsh’s Leith as a vernacular, rhizomatic and anti-institutional force, this essay hopes to illustrate how Welsh’s work redirects the popular notions of Scottish national identity and statehood toward a minor literature, a linguistic, political and historical divergence from the dominant Scottish literary experience

Culpable/Maternal Detectives: The Impossibility of a Caring Ecofeminist Community in Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog

In Kate Atkinson's ecofeminist crime novel Started Early, Took My Dog, the (semi-)retired investigators Jackson Brodie and Tracy Waterhouse at once collude with and wish to change exploitative capitalist patriarchal society. Trafficking epitomises its crime: the domination and exploitation of human and nonhuman animal others. Ecofeminism urges us to reconsider our complicity and embrace the vision of an interspecies community rooted in the motherly ethics of care. When confronted with a trafficked dog and female child, respectively, the tough Jackson and Tracy wish to transform into the maternal investigator of ecofeminist revision and create a caring (interspecies) family. But behind their maternal appearances lurks the noir perpetrator who mirrors his or her society's crimes. I argue that Atkinson uses the noir convention of the hard-boiled investigator shifting between identities – here borrowed from a sub-generic variant – to explore ordinary men and women's entrapment in contemporary society in the conflict between complicity and care. Through manipulation of point of view, we the readers are in fact implicated in this conflict as well.

Crime and Violence in the Fiction of Caterina Albert / Víctor Català Connections with the Crime Novel

After classifying the fictional genres that are to be found in the seven volumes of short stories by Caterina Albert / Víctor Català that were published between 1902 and 1951, this article studies the ways in which the corrosive sense and presence of violence and crime are used against the patriarchal system in her work. The new line of research presented here, comparing Víctor Català’s short stories with crime fiction, is still in its early stages. The analysis of some specific stories also considers the technical evolution and introduction of cinematographic forms. Finally, it is noted how Víctor Català is a precursor of women writers of today’s increasingly popular crime fiction.

A Reading of Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854) As a Crime Novel

This study explores how Charles Dickens presents a panoramic picture of social and moral crimes, criminals, victims and the causes as well as consequences of criminality in his novel Hard Times (1854). By employing Collins' Dickens and Crime (1964), the article provides a reading of Dickens' Hard Times as a crime novel, arguing that this novel is not only a social commentary on England in the Victorian era for the purpose of achieving social reform at the time. It is also a crime novel, portraying different types of crimes with various motives and criminals from different backgrounds and classes. Gradgrind, a follower of the utilitarian philosophy, manipulates his daughter Louisa into marrying the capitalist Bounderby for social and economic benefit, which, as a result, gets her to be exploited by Harthouse. In addition, Gradgrind's philosophy has affected his son Tom who has turned into an idle and selfish person, stealing the bank and indicting Stephen and indirectly causing the latter's death. Stephen is also a victim of the capitalist society and the Divorce Law, as only the rich have been entitled to divorce. By investigating Dickens' Hard Times as a crime novel, the study attempts to provide new insights into reading Dickens' novels at the present time, arguing that they can be reread as crime novels that intriguingly portray crimes, criminals, motives and the dire consequences of crime.