The spy who came in from the cold and Native Speaker

Foregrounded the previous studies of genre in literary studies (of Chu and Lowe), how have the race, gender, and class as significant elements constructing literary form affected to the transformation of hegemonic cultural elements in crime/detective fiction, which has been traditionally regarded as the bourgeois genre?

In sum, how has the literary form, including genre, been reflecting (or influenced by) the social, historical, and cultural history in the field of detective and crime fiction?

... the principal effect of the violence in the American detective story is to allow it to be experienced backwards, in pure thought, without risks, as a contemplative spectacle which gives not so much the illusion of life as the illusion that life has already been lived, that we have already had contact with the archaic sources of that Experience of which Americans have always made a fetish. 

Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, 3

Those who have lived before such terms as "high-brow fiction," "thrillers," and "detective fiction" were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and that the craving for it is perennial and should be satisfied. 

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932)

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (30, Oxford)

Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940

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The intersubjective, "public" symbolic space has lost its innocence: narrativization, integration into the symbolic order, into the big Other, opens up a mortal threat, far from leading to any kind of reconciliation. What one should bear in mind here is that this neutrality of the symbolic order functions as the ultimate guarantee for the so-called "sense of reality": as soon as this neutrality is smeared, "external reality" itself loses the self-evident character of something present "out there" and begins to vacillate, i.e., is experienced as delimited by an invisible frame: the paranoia of the noir universe is primarily visual, based upon the suspicion that our vision of reality is always already distorted by some invisible frame behind our backs--which is why Edward Hopper should also be included among the noir auteurs. (153)

In Hopper, the couple never looks straight into each other's eyes--a kind of visual equivalent to the "modernist" couples in Marguerite Duras's novels who can find love only by concentrating on some external task--the search for a third person, e.g. (154)

Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

Throughout lived social relations, it is apparent that labor is gendered, sexuality is racialized, and race is class-associated. (164)

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Duke UP, 1996)

At the heart of this vision of the New Deal, in sum, lay an image mirrored by the avant-gardist ideals fo writers like Cain and Chandler--the invocation of a latent, collective spirit whose realization would overcome the limits of narrow institutions. The echo was not merely fortuitous. The detective story had always been a liberal genre, centrally concerned with a fundamental premise of liberal theory--the rule of law--and with the tensions fundamental to democratic societies that constantly threw that principle into doubt. Though the complex roots of the genre may lie deep in cultural history, the detective story first sprang to life in its recognizable form in Edgar Allan Poe's stories from the 1840s, when the United States under Andrew Jackson's presidency had recently experienced both the advent of populist democracy and the transformative energies of a "market revolution"--in a society, in short, that had definitively traded its republican and agrarian legacy for a liberal, capitalist order. Employing Arthur Conan Doyle's innovations, the detective story leapt to mass popularity, first in England and then in the United States, near the turn of the century--at a time when the rise of organized capitalism and the evident failure of the unfettered market to deliver a just society gave rise to the first serious challenges to liberalism in both countries. Those key moments in the making of the genre came, in short, during periods when liberalism itself was in profound transition and when the social forces prodding its development threatened to tear the very idea of a liberal society to pieces. The detective story both registered that threat and turned it into a manageable tale, a political myth for that "anxious man" who "emerges as the creation of liberalism." It comes as no surprise, then, that detective fiction experienced its next major period of innovation in the United States during the interwar years, when a whole generation of intellectuals and politicians joined FDR in the effort to adjust liberalism to the special demands of an industialized economy and an urbanized nation. Hard-boiled crime fiction followed a parallel track. (6-7)

The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark 46p.

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My biggest contempt goes to the people who are eager to deny this, mostly the conservatives.

Beginning with Irving's Rip Van Winkle, the very first loafer in American literature, the character of loafer, or the image of it, which was most famously represented by Whitman himself, has been existed and pointed out by literary critics of Early and 19th-century American literature. Yet the transition of the loafers when the nation went into the age of urbanization has not been focused very much--where did all of them go? If they simply disappeared in the time of modernization, how and why did the phenomenon happen? Or, if we can say the form of the loafers was transformed into the figures of the low social class in the 20th century, such as criminals or prostitutes, what would be the process of it? If it is, how does the 20th-century crime fiction relate to the image of loafers in representing them? Can we connect the modern crime fiction and the 19th-century loafers, possibly as a form of protesting against the national/global ideology of capitalist work ethic, such as industrialism and moral purity as the loafers did in the 19th century?