For the most part, literary explorations of the urban context tend to focus on the emergence of various forms of violence as unavoidable by-products of life in the city. Starting with the 1930s, the appearance and great expansion of the mystery novel and, more recently, of an extensive phenomenon like noir literature have somehow monopolized the critical discussion, generating a variety of interpretive theories, as well as a number of stereotypes. The research moves along two main lines of investigation: the first concentrates on a re-examination of the reciprocal influence that writers, philosophers and intellectuals engaged in the discourse on city violence and alienation have had on each other (among them Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Benjamin vis a vis Poe and Melville, and down to Bellow and Salinger, Auster and Pynchon). The second part of the research, instead, is devoted to a study of that ever increasing number of writers, both affirmed and emerging, who in Europe and the U. S. have been more and more attracted within the typical domain of noir, a tendency that has often been interpreted in terms of its increasing appeal to an essentially dark urban imagination. In retracing and partially redefining, in a comparative perspective, patterns of reciprocal contamination between mainstream and noir literatures, the research aims also at revising the stereotyped view of urban violence as a product of single, or collective, criminal behaviors, in favor of a more complex perspective that looks at violence also as a phenomenon induced by the deterioration of the living conditions of urban environments. Finally, it is against the background of this hypothesis of an anonymous violence mainly caused by the carelessness of local and national public institutions that our research intends to verify the supposed heightened concern of noir fiction to contemporary social matters.
