The Hannibal Lecter Novels:
Modern/Postmodern Fables

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2003, Volume 2, Issue 2
https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2003/platt.htm

Len Platt
Goldsmiths College

A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe.

(Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, 1919)

The essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.

(Thomas Harris, Hannibal, 1999)

This essay makes a claim about the registration and significance of “popular” culture. In this case, it is the Hannibal Lecter novels that are elevated beyond being “just entertainment” to a position where they engage both with some central late-twentieth-century debates and with some characteristic obsessions of an earlier fin-de-siècle culture. This is not to deny that the Hannibal Lecter texts are shrewdly designed products of the modern culture industry — they clearly are. But this essay takes the now familiar position that such a status is not inconsistent with ambitions larger than the just commercial. Indeed, the suggestion here is that this sequence of novels constitutes a fascinating expression of nothing less than the condition of Western society and culture at the end of the twentieth century. This engagement with wider society and culture goes way beyond the occasional allusion to a specific event or contemporary concern, although there are plenty of those in these texts. In fact, these novels manage very much more sustained and complex positions established in relation to a whole range of issues that have emerged as being key to the period — issues around social cohesion and consent, for example, gender, sexuality, and, perhaps especially, class. These more fundamental engagements often appear not as momentary references but more complex textual dispositions. They are expressed in sustained and mediated techniques, frequently involving the signifying implications of narrative, which takes on dimensions of allegory and participates in metonymical and metaphorical meanings, especially, and not for the first time in the history of thriller writing, around ideas of modernity and postmodernity. 1 It is with this latter engagement that this essay is principally concerned.

The Hannibal Lecter novels, like all cultural products, are viewed here as being constitutive of culture and society, as well as having an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. They can be properly analyzed in terms of what Geertz terms the “thick description” of culture (10) where the organization, construction, and meaning of cultural products becomes treated in terms of how they are lodged within, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are an expression. “Popular” novels generally may have a particular significance here. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society, they often operate as strong expressions of society’s own sense of its life and values. Best-selling narratives often create fantasies, but they are sometimes expressive of more than mere escapism. 2Here the popular novel becomes the site of a characteristically open, direct and unapologetic expression of the ideals, dreams, anxieties, and frustrations of its readers. This means that, conventionally, popular fiction works to produce a utopianist view of life 3 and the Hannibal novels, the first two at any rate, are no exception. Although they are more hard-edged and engaged than many other forms of contemporary popular fiction, their pleasures lie in part in their expression of qualities and conditions that are lacking in real life. In this way, these novels become powerful vehicles of popular collective expression, articulating the tensions, and reconciliation, of everyday relations between individuals and society. It is partly for this reason that the central figure of these novels, Hannibal Lecter, can lay serious claim to being our Frankenstein, our Dracula, for like these earlier terror icons, he belongs to a fictional world that resonates with the contemporary condition.

Functional Mandibles? — Secure Sites and Discourses of Order

As J. Kenneth Van Dover and many others have established, the interrelation between the fictional detection of crime and the codification of scientific method goes right to the heart of the detective novel and its constructions of the world. 4 Linkages between order, science and detection are entirely characteristic of the form, and the Hannibal novels are no exception. Indeed, these pay exceptional attention to the redeeming powers of science and technology — their central figure, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is, ironically, himself a master of this modernity, a monster who attacks from within.

For all their apparent relish of dark corners and bloody chaos, then, the first two of these novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, like many thrillers, have at their center a conservative order of rationality, discipline, and control, something of which can be seen in the sites that they most privilege. Harris’s thrillers may be infamous for their exploitation of the bizarre pleasures of the dungeon and the unthinkable freedoms of the basement, but equally important to their narrative dynamic is the celebration of the expert, the technocrat, and the scientist. It is for this reason that the novels often elevate a very different kind of location — the more workaday office and laboratory. The true antithesis to the gruesome mess below Jame Gumb’s kitchen is only partly the all-American family den where the innocent victims romp. The further and, in many ways, more compelling counterpart is Beverley Katz’s “calm and busy” hair and fiber lab; Jimmy Price’s latent fingerprints department or Lloyd Bowman’s documents section.  It is here, in the bright light of advanced technocracy and science, that the awful “transformations” visualized by the mad logic of the psychopath are countered, and in more senses than one. These locations do more than simply provide the fortuitous space for chasing the madmen. They represent the authority of modern science pitted against the “transforming” instincts of the crazed alchemists, “Buffalo Bill” and the “Tooth Fairy.” In this sense, Harris follows traditions which go back to the beginnings of the detective novel in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries. Like Conan Doyle before him and many proponents of the form since, Harris configures narratives that insist on the progressivism of modern science and program the victory of scientific rationalism over bloody chaos.

The discourse equivalent to this arrangement of space is the stark contrast made between, on the one hand, a stylized mad talk characterized by grim parodics and mythopoetics and, on the other, the super efficiency of a range of jargons and officialese imported from the related worlds of criminology, psychology, and jurisprudence. Against the Red Dragon’s furious and slippery declaration that he is “not a man. I began as one but by the Grace of God and my Will, I have become Other” (Harris, Red 171) is positioned the very much more controlled script of the scientist, the administrator, and, above all, the State investigator. Clarice Starling, the heroine of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, is symptomatic here, a professional who speaks with the voice of a professional: “since Raspail is deceased and not suspected of anything, if we have permission of his executor to search the car, then it is a valid search and the fruit admissible in other matters at law” (Red 39). The conviction of order, operating according to known systems, underpins Starling’s professional status, but more than this it is central to her sense of the world and, indeed, to the security of the broader fictional world that these novels, and their film versions, construct.

Stylized technospeak trademarks not just Clarice Starling, then, but these novels generally and is clearly more than “just talk.” It is, firstly, an essential code for establishing authenticity. These texts can claim reality to the extent that their experts sound as if they know what they are talking about. The discourses deployed are specifically, even self-consciously, authoritative, sometimes to the point where fiction might reasonably be expected to be in danger of defeating its reader/audience, which is precisely the point about a sentence like, “no distinct respiratory organs on the dorsophalic regions, spiracles on the mesothorax and some abdominals, let’s start with that” (Harris, Silence 98). But more than operating as mere authentication, securing the surface of the texts as it were, these discourses signify at rather deeper narratological levels. They imply a modern world that is essentially ordered, secure, and authoritative. They register as the real weapons with which the grim perversions of psychopathology will be captured, studied, and, even, understood. Operating across “behavioral science,” police and military tradecraft, psychology, entomology, criminal pathology, and, of course, information technologies, such discourses construct the “positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic” dimensions of a “universal modernism.” They aim for “absolute truth,” “linear progress,” “the standardization of knowledge,” and they constitute “the rational ideal of an ideal social order.” 5 The obvious stars of Harris’s trilogy, Dr. Alan Bloom, Will Graham, Clarice Starling, Jack Crawford and so on, have the collective authority of an expert panel, a dream team, albeit aided by a little inspiration and imagination, typically supplied by the thoroughly transgressive and sociopathic expert, Hannibal. For the most part, these figures are technocrats implicated in State systems. Modernity in these texts is thus epitomized by the elite world of the FBI and its even more elite Behavioral Science Section. This is the world of VI-CAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and, up to the last in the trilogy at least, it signifies a modern order under threat but indispensable to humanity and just too good to lose.

To What, Then, Could I Have Aspired in My Craft?
 — Postmodern Mayhem

At one narrative level the dramas of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are victim saving. At a rather different level, they test the efficiency and ethics of the modern order against the wild and freakish monsters of psychopathology. There is a further danger to stability, however, and in some ways this is the more insidious threat. It comes from those who would disturb the integrity of the technocracy from within. Until Hannibal, these wild egoists and corrupters of the system are kept under control, and the strongest physical restraint in the case of Hannibal himself. Hannibal, however, produces not only a framework in which the good doctor is on the loose, but an astonishing contamination that transforms the essentially secure modernity constructed in the earlier novels. This is prefigured by a highly suggestive removal of some of the stalwarts of science and professionalism at the outset. With John Brigham, a master craftsman of law enforcement, being shot by an AIDS-carrying drug baroness in the first few pages, and Jack Crawford, the one-time administrative genius behind FBI Behavioral Science now transformed into a spent force, the stage becomes set for an extensive assault on the high virtue of professionalism and the efficiency of the moral technocracy. The authority of police craft and its commitment to “right” is displaced by a new order of corrupt officialdom. Scientific detection, the traditional mechanism of the moral world of the thriller, is banished to the cellars of Quantico where it occupies very limited physical space, has low status and can easily be manipulated by the new debased order. State security is not only thrown into the hands of the corrupt official, it is also put at the disposal of a figure new to Harris’s fiction (and owing something to American Psycho): the super-rich sociopath.

Innovation, a defining character of modernity, remains key in Hannibal. Here, however, science and technology serve not the State and the common good, but the highly idiosyncratic and individualist purposes of Mason Verger. This is the pedophilic sadist who seeks revenge for the havoc inflicted on his body by Dr. Lecter. Despite confinement to a supra high-tech dependency unit, this son of an immoral, and highly successful, capitalist is at the very center of the Hannibal world. In this way, the cool detachment of the professional becomes usurped by a madman who has the communications power to determine events on a global scale. His influence extends from the New World to the Old World, from the American center to the seeming outskirts of civilization on a remote Sicilian farm. In this novel, then, it is not the progressive powers of modernity that are in authority but, rather, the wildly twisted Verger, drinker of children’s tears. His enormous wealth allows him the effortless control of both law and order across continents and the criminal world. By this final novel, then, the distinction between good and bad guys, already under threat from the dark figure of the deadly psychologist, really is in danger of breaking down, as money and a crazed desire for revenge maintains rule over all.

Such an utter transformation does more than tip Hannibal into lapsarian disorder. Rather than evolving from the old modernity in some way, the site that is constructed here seems to have separated out and embarked on an entirely new course. The science so elevated in the earlier texts is hardly recognizable in its new incarnation as the genetics that races to produce and train the fiercest breed of pig, one that will consume a living human and thus become the agent of Verger’s bloody revenge on Lecter. Administrative efficiency and rationalism become perversely tricked into serving the awful vision forecasted by Mason Verger’s father, the pioneer in industrial livestock production who “in the 1940s … first took away the pigs’ fresh drinking water and had them drink ditch water, made of fermented animal waste, to hasten weight” (177). The separation of worlds, so characteristic of the earlier novels now becomes utterly compromised. The sociopath positioned at the very extremity of society and culture in the first two novels has moved to the hub where he becomes metonymical of the new modernity, by virtue of the association with new capitalism, mega-industrial power, and postmodern communications.

This reversal of things is highly suggestive of the modern/postmodern debates that flourished in the late-twentieth century, which makes it important to emphasize at this point that neither Hannibal the book nor film is postmodern in any formal, technical sense. Although both are more playful than the earlier texts and could perhaps be understood as adopting dispositions for McHale’s “ontological” over the “epistemological,” 6 Hannibal shows no postmodern preference for the pastiche that Jameson sees as so defining of new times culture (16-19). It clearly does not favor Hassan’s “exhaustion and silence” over “mastery and logos” (123-24). In narrative terms, Hannibal adopts a very obvious master code. A highly traditional thriller in many ways, Hannibal is a technically conservative fiction that adopts the position of finding itself in a different world. The angst of a certain kind of modernist is fundamental to the text, and it is this angst that takes its revenge against the now culture from which it feels so alienated. In this sense, Hannibal takes position after modernity, but it is not a postmodern novel in terms of textuality.

Such characteristics are hardly unique, but “popular” culture typically finds a way back to some kind of restoration of modernity ordered on conventional lines. Somehow morality is restored to science and bureaucracy, or, at least, personal morality wins out in some partial sense. This is where Hannibal breaks contract with its implied readership for, highly unusually, Hannibal can find no way of returning science, technology, or political economy back to the world in moral forms. Hannibal thus reproduces contemporaneity as an endgame, spiralling into corruption and vulgar decadence without hope of meaningful salvation. Modernity is not recoverable here. The best that Harris’s narrative can do is to exact a tangible (and terrible) revenge on the new times perversion as it is represented by the likes of Paul Krendler, the corrupt FBI man who is Starlings’s nemesis, and Mason Verger, the representative of modern capitalism gone horribly wrong. Indeed, this is the central dynamic of the Hannibal plot. The problem is where to find an agent for revenge on the necessary scale in a narrative that insists there is no moral or ethical cultural reserve to draw on. Harris’s answer to this predicament involves a considerable degree of risk taking. In the novel, it engages the removal of Starling from the heroine role and banks on the gamble that the readership will consent to the resurrection of a much older form of authority, one that has prestigious literary origins and no interest whatsoever in the salvation of modernity. The potential outcome of such a configuration may be gratifying in some ways, but it cannot redeem an irredeemable contemporaneity. It also implicates the Hannibal text in an obvious condescension towards modern life and a thorough mystification of the much-connected ideas of aristocracy and distinction. These are just two senses in which Hannibal really belongs to another time, and it is from this disposition that a “problem” with Hannibal the blockbuster emerged.

Return to Gothic — Aristocratic Revival

The Krendler and Verger figures in Hannibal are emblematic of a much wider sense of cultural decline. They are the exaggerated representatives of what Nietzsche has referred to as the “uglification” of modernity, of a general decadence and both moral and aesthetic disintegration that is imaged throughout Harris’s book as the contemporary condition. This is one of the great and, again, risky, divergences from the earlier novels. Hannibal produces a culture so debased that it is hardly worth the effort of saving — a devaluation that has highly significant results, producing the ambiguity, for instance, with which we must now read Hannibal’s carefree slaughter of the world’s vulgarians: for preference, we are told, Hannibal will always choose the vulgar as victim. This emptying of value from the contemporary world becomes confirmed not just in the broad narratology of a text where order, professionalism and authority are vanquished, but in a whole range of narrative detail — the representation of fast food, for example, “slippery meat and processed cheese food,” and of mass travel where the members of a package tour group rebreath “the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation on the ditch-liquor principle established by cattle and pig merchants in the 1950s” (290). Or, again, there is the reference with which this essay begins, where the narrator sees nothing less than “Elemental Ugliness in the faces of the crowd.” Such perspectives collude to designate a modernity that is a perversion of  “real” life. They suggest a highly superior angle on things and this becomes the characteristic position not just of Hannibal the character, but of the text itself.

It is against this vulgarized contemporaneity that the new Dr. Lecter now takes on a firmer shape. Much less of a bizarre puzzle than in the earlier fictions, he is significantly filled out in Hannibal and the central dimension is his status as a culturally displaced figure. A landed aristocrat by birth, whose family and their estates have been overrun by the Nazis, he becomes Europeanized and humanized, both as the traumatized brother/son, whose parents have been killed and sister eaten by soldiers, but also as the lost (last?) aristocrat:

We knooowww Hannibal  Lecter was born in Lithuania. His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his mother high-born Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of the servants. The children disappeared after that. (314)

This latter guise of Hannibal as dispossessed landowner is particularly important and invoked again and again, particularly in the novel version of the story. Through it, Hannibal becomes reconstituted in emblematic terms. Still straddling the scientific modernity he is master of and the darker atavistic universe that is his compelling reality, he also resonates with newly emphasized dimensions. Now he epitomizes the taste, tradition, and distinction that have been all but dispatched by the leveling dynamic of mass society and mass culture. In this context, the key elements in Dr. Lecter’s make-up, his extraordinary intelligence and great refinement (see, for instance his taste for exotic food — “wonderfully aromatic truffled pâté de fois gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems” (193) — for classic cars, the best perfumes and so on), these become culturally placed in unequivocal ways and deployed against Harris’s version of the awfulness of modern life.

The idea of the displaced landed aristocrat outcast from, or, at least, adrift in, a flat, monotone modernity is a very familiar and highly literary configuration. More particularly, it had a decisive role in the literary culture of Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. By the 1920s and 30s, the figure had a somewhat diminished cultural viability, which decreased further through the 1940s and 1950s, although there were periodic returns to aristocracy, in the British Gainsborough films produced for wartime audiences, for instance, or the BBC costume dramas, like Upstairs, Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited of a later period. Dr. Lecter joins ranks with these fictional aristocrats of the past. He can be aligned with the insecure and volatile fin de siècle cultural environment that produced such figures as Dracula (1897), the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Sir Henry Curtis in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier (1915), Lord Warburton in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), the Baskerville family in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the landowners of Yeats’s vanishing Anglo-Ireland and a host of other fictional figures created at the turn of the last century. This declining elite was constructed, with quite extraordinary frequency, precisely from the sense of vanishing order that characterizes Hannibal. The same return to aristocracy, as a measure of authentic social, and often national, value, appeared across a wide range of literary and film styles and genres. As characteristic of high modernism as popular historical romance, it is not too much to say that the defense of aristocracy was a characteristic attitude struck by the culture of that period. Writers and intellectuals, convinced that a decadent contemporaneity was becoming “leveled” and uniform, turned to the idea of aristocratic distinction as a Derridean hauntology hovering over debased modernity. 7

There clearly is a sense in which some key dimensions of Harris’s late twentieth century romance thriller derives from, and seeks connection with, this source. His aristocrat, like the aristocrats of the earlier period, is powerful, intelligent, refined, deracinated and, above all, usurped. For all the obvious ambiguities about the status of this dispossessed nobleman seeking revenge, Hannibal the Cannibal is one of a piece with the “turbulent, discontented men of quality” 8 who populate the earlier culture. In this most recent Hannibal Lecter story, Harris turns away from contemporaneity to identify with more “literary” narratological and aesthetic traditions. Thus Hannibal is highly romanticized and gothicized by comparison to the earlier novels. It is for this reason that Dr. Lecter, disguised as “Dr Fell,” is separated out from his former life as a renegade from the scientific establishment. In his first appearance in Hannibal, he figures not as a twisted psychiatrist but as a medieval scholar in Florence, leading a fruitful and relatively innocent life amongst the artifacts of the Old World, the world from which he so manifestly originates. Significantly, he inhabits a Gothic space, complete “with battlements like jack-o’-lantern teeth, bell tower soaring into the sky.” Like some version of the phantom of the opera, he is imaged playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on his clavier amongst the dark velvets of an elegant, spacious, renaissance room, and the reader is led into perception of this vision by a narrative intimacy again highly suggestive of late-nineteenth-century Gothic styles. Thus we have the whispered imperative, reminiscent of Poe, and Vincent Price, narrating, inviting us, “rest your head against the cold iron … and listen. You can hear a clavier …. If you believe you are beyond harm, will you go inside?” (154).

There are many further divergences from the earlier novels in Hannibal that confirm these shifting agendas and allegiances, but the broad sense of things should be clear without further illustration. What seems to have happened here is that Harris has swapped one kind of fantasy for another. The earlier commitment to a state modernity, characterized by order and efficiency and constructed from a basic confidence in progress, has become entirely compromised. With science and technology misappropriated, not simply by the sociopathic exception (Hannibal) but by the  corrupt generality, narrative commitment to the modern becomes displaced by a kind of appalled disgust. This new sensibility takes its authority from a retrospective that draws on, and redesigns, somewhat old-fashioned literary responses to the idea of the modern. At the very center of Hannibal then, is that familiar idea of the Old World operating as a visitation on the New for the crimes it has committed against authentic “civilization” and “the glories of the great races” (Stoker 26).

It is not entirely surprising, given this revivalist instinct, cultural retrospection and the accompanying detachment from urban, modern life, that Harris’s audiences may have felt somewhat puzzled and even aggrieved by Hannibal. It was widely felt that Hannibal was not as accomplished a thriller as The Silence of the Lambs (1989), or even as the prototype Lecter novel Red Dragon (1982). A sense of unease became apparent in the pre-production negotiations over Hannibal the film, with Jodie Foster pulling out of the project. Her reasons for doing so were not entirely clear, but may have had something to do with Harris’s bizarre transformation of the Starling role from ambitious FBI operator to Hannibal’s lover and partner in madness. Although other reasons were suggested for Foster’s withdrawal — the press reported that she was peeved at being excluded from preliminary discussions on the film, for example — it is easy to imagine that she read this metamorphosis of Starling the action-hero into Hannibal’s “partner” as a change too far.

Perhaps the further reason for this sense of letdown is that by comparison to the early novels, Hannibal is indeed “unrealistic” and “not believable,” in the sense that it operates according to principles quite different from the earlier fictions, most of which involve a very precise turning away from the modernity so streamlined and efficient in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Most importantly, Hannibal rejects contemporaneity for the comfortable familiarity of stylized romance, and it is this that produces the most serious offence. Among other things, Harris’s new taste for the romantic has been responsible for transforming the tough heroine of The Silence of the Lambs into a curiously fantastic figure, still dangerous but now made monster, feminized in swathes of finery, and above all, subjected to the astonishing indiscretion of becoming Hannibal’s woman. But the indicators of Harris’s new direction do go far beyond that final twist. They are, indeed, embedded in the Hannibal text as the signifiers that denote a strong appreciation for the “good life” and, as corollary, a disdainful distance from communities of the modern.

In this sense, this terror icon has lost some cultural purchase, perhaps because the exploitation has reached a natural saturation, but also because the last version proves awkward to readers and, despite the attempt by filmmakers to moderate things, film audiences also. The argument here is that the underlying problem with Hannibal is not that it is simply one reprise too many or that it fails the quality test, but, rather, that it constitutes a kind of betrayal of the earlier novels. The offence is not just a matter of the volte face that, in the book version at least, turns a strong young woman from the American West into an aristocratic vamp monster of the Old World, although that conservative gender move is understood as being symptomatic here. The more general shift is that, with Hannibal, Harris sets about a systematic canceling of his confidence in a highly technocratic modernity. The authority of this version of the modern, established so completely in the earlier texts, and so decisively connected to Starling’s original status, now becomes undermined. Indeed Dr. Lecter’s last outing is to a modernity that has no remaining capacity for security or salvation. In this sense the shocks of the set pieces of the third Hannibal incarnation — the poeticized gutting of Rinaldo Pazzi, for instance, and the exquisite scene in which Hannibal and Starling dine on Paul Krendler’s brain — become outdone by a disturbance more subtle and, in many ways, more interesting: the breaking of an epistemological contract between a hugely popular writer and his public. At the center of this divergence is a shifting articulation of the nature of modernity, and it is in this sense that these texts, and their reception, can become linked to one of the defining debates of intellectual times since the mid 1970s.


Notes

1.  See, for example Thompson.

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2.  For a deconstructive discussion of the term “entertainment,” see Dyer, 11-15.

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3. For a discussion of utopianism in other cultural forms see Dyer, 11-34.

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4. See, for example, Van Dover, 1994.

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5. This is modernity according to the editors of the architectural journal PRECIS 6 (1987): 7-24, quoted in an early account of postmodernity — Harvey, 9.

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6. McHale makes this essential distinction in Postmodern Fiction. By “epistemological,” he means a novel that attempts to grasp a complex but essentially singular reality. “Ontological” refers to a postmodern vision that sees reality as pluralistic.

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7. For a discussion of this phenomenon see Platt.

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8. Appropriately, given his defence of traditional values, the phrase is Edmund Burke’s, 135.

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Works Cited

Burke Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Geertz, Clifford. Interpreting Cultures. London: Hutchinson, 1975.

Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. London: The Bodley Head, 1982.

Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. London: Random House, 1990.

Harris, Thomas. Hannibal. London: Random House, 1999.

Hassan, I. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture and Society  2.3 (1985): 119-131.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford and Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.

Platt, Len. Aristocracies of Fiction: the Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Literature. Connecticut: Greenwood, 2000.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ware: Wordsworth, 1993.

Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Van Dover, Kenneth. You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective Novel. Bowling Green, OH: The Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1994.

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