Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Outputs (4)

Slum Plays, Salvation Stories, and Crook Pictures: The Gangster Regeneration Cycle and the Prehistory of the Gangster Genre (2017)
Journal Article
Heffernan, N. (2017). Slum Plays, Salvation Stories, and Crook Pictures: The Gangster Regeneration Cycle and the Prehistory of the Gangster Genre. Film History, 29(2), 32-65. https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.29.2.02

Recent scholarship exhorts film historians to attend to production cycles in order to interrogate established conceptions of genres. This essay identifies and examines a neglected cycle of gangster regeneration films that flourished between 1910 and... Read More about Slum Plays, Salvation Stories, and Crook Pictures: The Gangster Regeneration Cycle and the Prehistory of the Gangster Genre.

“As Usual, I'll Have to Take an IOU”: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Gift of Black Music and the Cultural Politics of Obligation (2017)
Journal Article
Heffernan, N. (2018). “As Usual, I'll Have to Take an IOU”: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Gift of Black Music and the Cultural Politics of Obligation. Journal of American Studies, 52(4), 1095-1121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021875817000883

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois described African American music as a “gift” to America, contesting the tendency to regard white interest in black culture as appropriation or theft. Yet this metaphor invoked the complex circuits of... Read More about “As Usual, I'll Have to Take an IOU”: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Gift of Black Music and the Cultural Politics of Obligation.

Acts of violence: the World War II veteran private-eye movie as an ideological crime series (2015)
Book Chapter
Heffernan, N. (2015). Acts of violence: the World War II veteran private-eye movie as an ideological crime series. In C. Miranda, J. Anderson, & B. Pezzotti (Eds.), Serial crime fiction: dying for more. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483690

According to Gramsci, serial tales are ‘a powerful factor in the formation of the mentality and morality of the people’. ‘The serial novel’, he suggests, ‘is a real way of day-dreaming’ whose heroes ‘enter into the intellectual life of the people […]... Read More about Acts of violence: the World War II veteran private-eye movie as an ideological crime series.