originally published 11/19/2018

Francophone studies professor Susanna Lee joins us to talk about moral authority in the heroes of hard-boiled crime fiction. Drawing from Georg Lukács’s distinction between epic heroes and heroes of the modern novel, Lee explains how the hard-boiled detective of French and American crime fiction shares similarities with both of these archetypes. Though the hard-boiled protagonists navigate a world in which God is absent, Lee locates the models for their moral authority in the religious and literary figures of the early nineteenth-century who were attempting to fill the void of religious authority left in the wake of the French and American revolutions. Lee is the author of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority (The Ohio State University Press, 2016). This interview was originally published on Volume 141 of the Journal.

24 minutes

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