The Politics of Sara Paretsky’s Detective Fiction

Abstract

In Chapter 6, changing reading practices, especially the emergence of black feminism, show that, contrary to traditional accounts, Light in August and Jazz both subvert the conventions of detective and naturalist fiction. In these novels violent outsiders do not amount to criminals or justify the conventional norms of justice. More fully than Light in August, which preserves the modernist pessimism of Absalom, Absalom!, Jazz emphasizes, at the same time, the characters’ ability to overcome the past and improve their lives and undermines the distinctions between the individual and the community, the narrator and the characters, and the city and the country.