The Heritage of Cain: Crime in American Fiction

Abstract

For almost two centuries American fiction has featured crime, but its treatment in popular literature, which strokes the norms of a mass audience, has been quite different from that in high art, which examines critically the assump tions and values of our society. A study of serious fiction can, therefore, probe fundamental issues for us: How does literature define crime? Why does this definition differ occasionally from the statutory one? What crimes has fiction taken most seriously? How does fiction assess the criminal's circumstances and motivation? What is the literary attitude to criminal responsibility? What is the victim's role in crime? How is the criminal apprehended? How does the trial contribute to equity? How are legal professionals, the jury, and the insanity defense portrayed? How does litera ture rank criminal punishments? We can postulate tentative answers to these rather open-ended questions, but in a larger sense their value is heuristic, forcing us to reconsider some hypotheses we may have taken for granted.