Spaces of Violence

James R. Giles is Presidential Teaching Professor of English at Northern Illinois University and author of eight books, including Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence and Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren.

I enjoyed reading The Spaces of Violence and learned a lot from it. . . . One of the most important contributions it makes to the wider discussion of violence and American literature is its insistence that violence is not a characteristic of urban life only, but permeates all regions—urban, suburban, and rural."—Robert Rebein, author of Hicks, Tribes, & Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism"Giles explores in literary terms our national desire ‘to immerse ourselves in gore."—American Book ReviewThe Spaces of Violence is a welcome contribution to scholarship on American preoccupation with cyclical carnage."—Rocky Mountain Review

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Violence and Space2. Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God3. Russell Banks’s Affliction: “All Those Solitary Dumb Angry Men”4. Of Vultures, Eyeballs, and Parrots: Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle5. The Myth of the Boatright Men: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina6. Playing for Death: Don DeLillo’s End Zone7. Drifting through Urantia: Greyhound Space in Denis Johnson’s Angels8. The Return of John Smith: Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer9. “The Battle of Bob Hope” and “The Great Elephant Zap”: Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers10. “I Hope You Didn’t Go into Raw Space without Me”: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho11. Violence and Family StructuresNotesWorks CitedIndex