Literary Precedents for Dance Hall of the Dead

This Study Guide consists of approximately 52 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Dance Hall of the Dead.

Literary Precedents for Dance Hall of the Dead

This Study Guide consists of approximately 52 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Dance Hall of the Dead.
This section contains 230 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Dance Hall of the Dead Study Guide

Hillerman's novels fit into so many traditional sub-categories of detective fiction that he becomes almost impossible to classify in such terms. Ethnic detectives like Chee and Leaphorn have appeared in the earliest detective fiction, as Edgar Allan Poe's protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, was a Frenchman living in Paris, and his other major detective figure, Legrand, is a displaced Huguenot living in South Carolina.

As an ethnic detective writer, Hillerman belongs in the same category as Australian Arthur Upfield, whose works featuring halfAborigine half-Anglo Napoleon Bonaparte apparently influence some of Hillerman's writing. Bonaparte also must work in relatively isolated areas—many even largely and more sparsely populated than the "Big Reservation." Like Bonaparte, Chee and Leaphorn also hark back to the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and others, in which the hero finds himself struggling between the opposing cultures and values of civilization and the...

(read more)

This section contains 230 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Dance Hall of the Dead Study Guide
Copyrights
BookRags
Dance Hall of the Dead from BookRags. (c)2024 BookRags, Inc. All rights reserved.