Thriller (Noir)

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Lee Horsley (Lancaster University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1930

Places

United States (Location)

Genres and Modes

Prose Fiction Narrative
Thriller/ Noir
Cinema/ Film/ TV
- Thriller/ Noir (film)

Resources

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The word “noir” has become widespread both in academic discourse and as a signifier of sleek commercialism. In the cinema alone, there have been over three hundred noir-influenced films released since 1971, and the term is applied not only to films but to television programmes, comics and video games, a growth in usage that has spawned “fusion phrases” such as “cable noir”, “TV noir”, “pop noir”, “cyber noir”, “tech noir”, “future noir” and “digital noir”. It has also increasingly been applied to crime fiction, and it is therefore useful to ask what meaning “noir” has when it is applied to literature. To formulate a definition appropriate to novels it is obviously necessary to go beyond the visual and other specifically cinematic qualities on which…

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1653 words

Citation: Horsley, Lee. "Thriller (Noir)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1125, accessed 11 May 2024.]

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