James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction

(Hardback)

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James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Browns Requiem in 1981, Ellroys eccentric Demon Dog persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroys fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroys two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroys fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse peeping tom into a recognizable, contemporary social type, a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory cinematic world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of ocularcentric crisis in Ellroys texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroys worksparticularly his later novelsare themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.

Reviews

James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction is an importantwork which drawsyou into the mind's eye of the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. By engaging with existing critical material and forging a new path in readings of Ellroy, Nathan Ashman has earneda place in the front rank of Ellroy scholars. -- Steven Powell, University of Liverpool
Nathan Ashman's book is a welcome and valuable additionto the growing body of critical work on James Ellroy and the type of historical crime fiction he writes. Well-written, carefully researched, theoreticallyinformed and textually astute, it provides a reading of Ellroy's most important fiction thatfocuseson the obsessive voyeurism at their core, and thedesire for knowledge,both of individual crimes andtheir relation to the largerpublic sphere, that it signifies. This is an important contribution both to our knowledge of Ellroy's work and to crime fiction studies in general. -- Professor Peter Messent, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK

Author Bio

Nathan Ashman is lecturer in crime writing at the University of East Anglia.