Warnes, A orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-6565 (2017) Fatal Eyeballing: Sex, Violence, and Intimate Voyeurism in Richard Wright’s Native Son. In: Bendixen, A and Carr Edenfield, O, (eds.) The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature . Routledge , Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK , pp. 161-182. ISBN 9781138680470
Abstract
The plots of US crime ctions often turn on the fate of the body of a woman who has suffered male violence. The resurfacing of a female corpse and the upsetting evidence it brings to light prove crucial to the conviction of the main criminal in James Ellroy’s Clandestine (1982) and James Lee Burke’s Cimarron Rose (1997), for example. Elsewhere, in William Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary (1931) and Patricia Highsmith’s A Game for the Living (1958), central female gures survive their ordeal and go on to describe their physical degradation in the cause of prosecution. The bodies of most female victims, however, testify after death. The detection of their blood or the traces of their DNA remind the living that they were once the focus of an annihilating passion: that the sexual consumption of their bodies itself turned them into potential courtroom proof and that this then led their attackers to try to hide or wipe them from view. Many US crime stories can still be charted by the appalling, yet revealing, descents undergone by the female bodies at their heart. Sources of desire and victims of violence, silenced objects that still sometimes voice and sometimes become damning evidence, these bodies are in every way central, and to track their transformations is often to retell nothing less than the story itself.
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Item Type: | Book Section |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture on 15 Jun 2017, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138680470. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 30 Sep 2016 13:20 |
Last Modified: | 15 Dec 2018 01:38 |
Published Version: | https://www.routledge.com/9781138680470 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Series Name: | Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:92904 |