Can I read 2 Deadly Is the Female Animal: Smell in James Cain’s Serenade on EtoBox?

2 Deadly Is the Female Animal: Smell in James Cain’s Serenade by Gregory Forter is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is 2 Deadly Is the Female Animal: Smell in James Cain’s Serenade about?

Deadly Is the Female Animal Smell in James Cain's Serenade "Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?" There's something fishy in the work of James Cain, something that doesn't smell right. I mean this, first of all, as a metaphor, though I propose to take that metaphor seriously. And I mean it to crystalize what the more discriminating among Cain's critics have sensed for some time: that central to the experience of reading him-central to the fascinated revulsion that so often greets his work-is a disagreeable and depressing sensation of having been "had." Cain seems somehow always to be cheating, to be playing dirty. The goods he delivers evaporate behind their thin glitzy wrappers, leaving only an overpowering scent of sulfur and sleazy sex. His effects grip and seduce us, sometimes even to furious abandon, but they also invariably muss us up, since they are, in the end, dirty little tricks, cheap and sensational effects, shams-by no means the real thing at all. "The list [of ingredients that made Cain's first novel a success] must always include a large item of trickery," writes W. M. Frohock in his book about violence in American fiction. 1 Or again, from Joyce Carol Oates's essa

Author

Gregory Forter

Publisher

New York University Press

Published

2022

Language

EN

ISBN

9780814728710

Subjects

History, Science, Literary Fiction