11: Balance in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction 1
5. 1: “Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance” in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 13
6. 2: Retracing Our Steps in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” 19
7. 3: “Scrutinizing the Parchment More Closely”: The Form of “The Gold- Bug” and Its Relationship to That of the Dupin Tales 28
8. 4: Form and Reform in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Earth’s Holocaust” 35
9. 5: The Circle and Its Center in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 41
10. 6: Chiasmus in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden 55
11. 7: The Mythological Centers of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books 62
12. 8: Table as Text in James Joyce’s “The Dead” 69
13. 9: The Structure of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands” 75
14. 10: The Architecture of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Three-Day Blow” 83
15. 11: Balance in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon 92
16. 12: Framing Caesar in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep 99
17. 13: The Ridge of the Domino in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train 107
18. 14: The “X in the Air” in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 116
19. 15: The Hybrid Center of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 122
20. Notes 131
21. Bibliography 157
22. Index 177