Literatura policial: gender, genre, and appropriation in Argentine and Brazilian hard-boiled crime fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how adaptations of the hard-boiled crime genre have become tools for literary innovation and social criticism in the work of four contemporary authors. Since the 1970s, influential writers such as Rubem Fonseca in Brazil and Ricardo Piglia in Argentina have established new national variants of literatura policial as nuanced forms of protest against cultures of impunity and state terrorism. More recently, Brazilian Patrícia Melo and Argentine Claudia Piñeiro have enriched these national traditions with their own interpretations of urban violence and created new ways for women to speak in a genre that has been heavily dominated by men. As a popular genre associated with a conservative, Anglo-centric worldview, crime fiction was long ignored by critics of Latin American literature; even now that its importance is increasingly recognized, most studies have dwelt on its relationship with government and capitalism, neglecting its metafictional qualities and its critique of gender relations. By focusing both on representations of male and female characters and on various modes of discourse in the work of Fonseca, Piglia, Melo, and Piñeiro, this dissertation brings a new perspective to an undervalued body of literature.