Written in an accessible style, this book describes how detective mysteries appeal through their diverting styles rather than their violent plots. Ranging from Hammett's early P.I. stories to films by Coppola and David Lynch, this study probes the ways verbal and cinematic strategies hold our attention. The diversions offered by irrelevant descriptions, the misdirections flaunted by snappy dialogue and unusual personal "attitudes", keep suspense alive when weleast expect it.

Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections

Comics & Graphic Novels

Mitchell, Lee Clark

Graphic Novels

Oxford University Press

More Time is a study of the careers of four brilliant short story writers (Alice Munro, Andre Dubus, Joy Williams, and Lydia Davis), concentrating on their later styles as those emerged from earlier stories. The contrast between early and late, as well as among the four writers themselves, reveals how diverse the short story has become in recent years, defying any effort to identify a single trajectory or presumed constitution to it as a literary form.

More Time: Contemporary Short Stories and Late Style

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. "Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."—J. Hoberman, London Review of Books "[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."—The Observer "Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."—Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

University of Chicago Press

Determined Fictions

United States

Columbia University Press

In this first major book to present a comprehensive look at photographs of Indians by both Native and Anglo Americans, from 1840 to the present, we are offered a compelling array of images reproduced with exacting respect for the physical qualities of the photograph as a document. Alfred Bush and Lee Mitchell help us see these photographs not only as historical artifacts but as rich texts that describe their makers as tellingly as their subjects. More than three hundred images relate an important tale of the intrusion of technology into the traditional life of the American Indian, and the political uses both Native Americans and Anglo Americans found for the photograph.
 These photographs reveal the many agendas of both photographers and American Indians. From images pandering to popular stereotypes to ones that catch troubling realities, these photographs encourage us to consider the photographic enterprise from various perspectives, including those of Native Americans. Contradicting the common notion that Native American photographers are a recent phenomenon, Indians make their appearance as photographers in this work as early as the 1880s with portrayals as varied and conflicted as any by Anglo Americans. The exciting dynamics among multiple American cultures encountering each other through art and technology is masterfully documented here. The text provides authoritative dating of the photographs, biographies of the photographers, and an extensive bibliography. This is a treasurehouse for readers with interests in Native Americans and their history and in the history of photography.

The Photograph and the American Indian

Bush, Alfred L.

Travel

Princeton University Press

Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton Legacy Library)

Propelled across the continent by notions of rugged individualism" and "manifest destiny," pioneer Americans soon discovered that such slogans only partly disguised the fact that building an empire meant destroying a wilderness. Through an astonishing range of media, they voiced their concern about America's westward mission. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence, Lee Clark Mitchell portrays the growing apprehensionsOriginally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Business & Money

Economics

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

For more than a century the cinematic Western has been America’s most familiar genre, always teetering on the verge of exhaustion and yet regularly revived in new forms. Why does this outmoded vehicle—with the most narrowly based historical setting of any popular genre—maintain its appeal? In Late Westerns Lee Clark Mitchell takes a position against those critics looking to attach “post” to the all-too-familiar genre. For though the frontier disappeared long ago, though men on horseback have become commonplace, and though films of all sorts have always, necessarily, defied generic patterns, the Western continues to enthrall audiences. It does so by engaging narrative expectations stamped on our collective consciousness so firmly as to integrate materials that might not seem obviously “Western” at all. Through plot cues, narrative reminders, and even cinematic frameworks, recent films shape interpretive understanding by triggering a long-standing familiarity audiences have with the genre. Mitchell’s critical analysis reveals how these films engage a thematic and cinematic border-crossing in which their formal innovations and odd plots succeed deconstructively, encouraging by allusion, implication, and citation the evocation of generic meaning from ingredients that otherwise might be interpreted quite differently. Applying genre theory with close cinematic readings, Mitchell posits that the Western has essentially been “post” all along.

Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre (Postwestern Horizons)

University Of Nebraska Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mitchell, Lee Clark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mitchell, Lee Clark