French and American noir : dark crossings / Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker.
There is a longstanding misconception surrounding the term French noir, according to which the post-war French thriller and film noir were merely a development of, or response to, a pre-existing American tradition. This book aims to challenge this understanding of French noir, at once examining the...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via ProQuest) |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Basingstoke [England] ; New York, NY :
Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
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| Series: | Crime files series.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | There is a longstanding misconception surrounding the term French noir, according to which the post-war French thriller and film noir were merely a development of, or response to, a pre-existing American tradition. This book aims to challenge this understanding of French noir, at once examining the complexity of this transatlantic exchange and refocusing debate to include a Franco-French lineage, especially in the case of French noir fiction. The result is a study of a 'genre' whose tendency is towards reflexivity and self parody. Where noir is keenly conscious of its own narrative structure, French noir is a celebration of its own French ancestry. Baudelaire is not simply a pioneer or forefather; instead, he lives on in twentieth-century French noir as a prose poetics. Sartre's Existentialism is not merely an accompanying philosophy to noir's mean streets but a crucial intertext, as relevant to the fiction and cinema of the 1990s and beyond as to the thrillers of the immediate post-war years. With French and American Noir, Rolls and Walker hope to put the French back into French noir. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (ix, 229 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 200-221) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780230244825 0230244823 1349358657 9781349358656 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Print version record. |