Violent Minds
Modernism and the Criminal

Just as cultural attitudes toward criminality were undergoing profound shifts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist authors became fascinated by crime and its perpetrators, as well as the burgeoning genre of crime fiction. Throughout the period, a diverse range of British and American novelists took the criminal as a case study for experimenting with forms of psychological representation while also drawing on the conventions of crime fiction in order to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the criminal mind. Matthew Levay traces the history of that attention to criminal psychology in modernist fiction, placing understudied authors like Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and Patricia Highsmith in dialogue with more canonical contemporaries like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Dashiell Hammett, and Gertrude Stein. Levay demonstrates criminality's pivotal role in establishing quintessentially modernist forms of psychological representation and brings to light modernism's deep but understudied connections to popular literature, especially crime fiction.

Introduction; 1. Modernist detection: minds, mindlessness, and the logic of criminal pursuit; 2. Criminal types: anarchism, terrorism, and the violence of chance; 3. The modernist crime novel: popular literature and the forms of experiment; 4. Cases of identity: late modernism and the life of crime; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Matthew Levay is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University. His research focuses on twentieth-century literature, with emphases in modernism, the history and theory of the novel, literary genres, and popular print culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernist Cultures, MLQ, and the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.