![]() The detective writers upon whom McCann focuses did not take such a sanguine view. Roosevelt and the framers of the New Deal believed that, given sufficient legal and regulatory power, the federal government could not only protect the public welfare but create a common culture. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler re-envisioned the classic detective story (exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe's and Arthur Conan Doyle's works) according to a “logic that mirrored the ‘realist’ critique of traditional liberal theory.” That is, the classic detective story typically banished an anomalous evil and restored order to an imagined community ruled by law and rational self-interest, whereas hard-boiled crime fiction projects images of a society in which the liberal faith in individualism and representative government has disintegrated. His central thesis is that writers such as James M. McCann's Gumshoe America focuses on the “hard-boiled” crime fiction that flourished in the United States between roughly 19. ![]() Whereas numerous studies have focused on the proletarian and radical literature or, as does Michael Denning's monumental The Cultural Front (1996), on the “laboring”of depression-era America, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay convincingly demonstrate that the various strains of New Deal reformism are inscribed on a wide range of American literary works during the period. As the titles of these two excellent books suggest, they explore the interrelationships between literary production and the political and economic revolution wrought by the New Deal. ![]()
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