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Dracula and Detection: Among Genres II

John Wilson Foster

in Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction

This chapter begins with a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Man. It then discusses the work of Elliot O'Donnell, including Werewolves. It then analyzes detective fiction.

Police Detectives in Fiction

Haia Shpayer-Makov

in The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England

Although detective fiction projected varied images of police detectives, certain patterns are discernible across a range of literary texts, revealing a less complimentary portrayal of police ... More

Although detective fiction projected varied images of police detectives, certain patterns are discernible across a range of literary texts, revealing a less complimentary portrayal of police detectives than in the press. In fictional works, they are often described as mediocre and incompetent. Moreover, the mounting body of fictive texts incorporating detectives in the narrative preferred to concentrate on the private detective, whether amateur or paid practitioner, presenting him or her as the dominant crime fighter in society. This chapter considers the literary image of the police detective in both canonical and non-canonical texts and explains it in the context of contemporary sensibilities and concerns.Less

Detecting “Absolute Chance”

Charles Peirce and Anna Katharine Green

in Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

This chapter examines pragmatism by focusing on two writers who rely on chance to conduct their investigations: Charles Sanders Peirce and Anna Katharine Green. It looks at Green's detective fiction ... More

This chapter examines pragmatism by focusing on two writers who rely on chance to conduct their investigations: Charles Sanders Peirce and Anna Katharine Green. It looks at Green's detective fiction (including The Woman in the Alcove) in relation to Peirce's account of his own sleuthing after a stolen watch (“Guessing”) and shows that both writers had difficulty reconciling a socializing conception of chance with narrative forms that are, by definition, highly teleological. The chapter first traces the development of Peirce's conception of absolute chance out of his earlier and more cautious claims about probability theory and pragmatic contingency, along with his gradual transition from pragmatism in the 1870s to a more traditional metaphysics later. It then considers Green's chance-saturated fiction which, like that of Peirce, encounters the problem of representing chance in a genre destined to demystify crime in the end. The chapter concludes by looking at a third detective writer interested in chance, Edgar Allan Poe.Less

Repositioning the debate

Cynthia S. Hamilton

in Sara Paretsky: Detective fiction as trauma literature

This chapter proposes two new frameworks for assessing the subversive possibilities of detective fiction: trauma literature and historiographical discourse. The discussion of trauma literature ... More

This chapter proposes two new frameworks for assessing the subversive possibilities of detective fiction: trauma literature and historiographical discourse. The discussion of trauma literature references the work of Caruth, LaCapra, Felman, Herman, and Luckhurst. The work of Ricoeur and White frame the discussion of historiographical writing. Neither of these frameworks has been recognised or used in relation to the analysis of detective fiction. Both have been suggested by developments over time within Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series. A discussion of detective fiction as a literature of trauma enables a perspective on the politics of agency within detective fiction. The examination of detective fiction as a historiographical discourse illuminates the way detective fiction can be used to expose the politics of marginalisation within the construction of historical discourses. As this suggests, the two frameworks are not discrete, but interrelated, for they intersect within a politics of identity.Less

The Life Spans of Genres

Ted Underwood

in Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change

Disagreements about the history of genre are hard to resolve because contemporary readers inevitably see earlier works through a retrospective lens. We may call the novels of Mary Shelley "science ... More

Disagreements about the history of genre are hard to resolve because contemporary readers inevitably see earlier works through a retrospective lens. We may call the novels of Mary Shelley "science fiction," for instance, but that phrase didn't exist when she wrote them, and it is difficult to be sure that the genealogical connections we perceive aren't shaped by a need to find ourselves reflected in the past. There may be no perfect solution to this dilemma, but statistical models of genre do provide a new kind of leverage on it, because a model defined only by nineteenth-century examples can be genuinely ignorant about the present, and can serve as a proxy for the literary standards of a vanished era. Using this method, the chapter examines the history of science fiction, detective fiction, and the Gothic. The generational divides predicted by Franco Moretti do not appear. Models trained only on pre-Gernsback "scientific romance" are capable of recognizing their kinship to contemporary science fiction. Detective fiction, similarly, is revealed as a tightly unified genre, with a continuity that stretches back to Edgar Allan Poe. The Gothic, on the other hand, falls apart into several different subgenres.Less

The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile: Ovid and the Roman Detectives

Helen Lovatt

in Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid

This chapter explores different representations of the search for the reason behind Ovid’s exile (an enduring fascination) by focusing on Ovid’s exile as a subject for mystery writers. The chapter ... More

This chapter explores different representations of the search for the reason behind Ovid’s exile (an enduring fascination) by focusing on Ovid’s exile as a subject for mystery writers. The chapter begins by exploring J. C. Thibault’s influential work of scholarship The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (1964) before considering two novels: David Wishart’s unashamedly populist 1995 Ovid and Benita Kane Jaro’s 2009 Betray the Night. The chapter explores the attraction of Roman politics to the authors of detective fiction and these novelistic representations of Ovid’s life and exile, and poetry, arguing that popular fiction offers a distinctive insight into the reception of Ovid’s exile, and that it is more difficult than one might expect to differentiate between history and fiction, literature and pulp. The representation of Ovid’s exile is also about a battle over different types of history, and detective fiction offers an active, yet reassuringly positivist, role for the reader.Less

Probably Poe

Maurice S. Lee

in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Focusing on Poe’s detective fiction, this chapter discusses the spread of probability theory in the 1830s and 1840s—in logic and mathematics, in sociology and statistics, and in gaming practices, ... More

Focusing on Poe’s detective fiction, this chapter discusses the spread of probability theory in the 1830s and 1840s—in logic and mathematics, in sociology and statistics, and in gaming practices, insurance, and the popular press. Poe’s fiction and literary criticism simultaneously draw from and resist emerging concepts of chance as he participates in his era’s probabilistic revolution to advocate a surprisingly realistic aesthetic. As Poe bridges gaps between romanticism and science, we can begin to align his thinking and writing with pragmatism more than deconstruction. Poe thus appears less as a maven of gothic, linguistic, and psychological indeterminacy and more a proponent of rational action under conditions of partial knowledge. On the cutting edge of the probabilistic revolution in America, Poe registers the rise of chance in intellectual and cultural domains.Less

Technologies of Detection

Lena Wånggren

in Gender, Technology and the New Woman

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force ... More

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective. Mapping the literary trope of the New Woman detective, and the part played by modern technologies in these narratives, the chapter considers the nature of forensic evidence and the gendered use of technologies in producing this knowledge. Reading M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), the chapter considers New Woman detective fiction as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle.Less

Welty’s Moonlighting Detective: Whiteness and Eudora Welty’s Subversion of the American Noir Tradition in “The Demonstrators”

Jacob Agner

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

This essay argues that Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story, “The Demonstrators,” casts a spotlight on the “crime” of systemic racism in the U.S. South through the popular crime genre of American ... More

This essay argues that Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story, “The Demonstrators,” casts a spotlight on the “crime” of systemic racism in the U.S. South through the popular crime genre of American noir fiction and film. Although a mid-twentieth-century category mainly recognized for its depictions of dark cities and shadowy “mean streets,” noir’s stylized world collides with the Closed Society in Welty’s late story and throws into stark relief the subtler effects of white supremacy. Turning noir’s key traits on their head (e.g., black-and-white chiaroscuro lighting, the femme fatale, and the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction), Welty throughout “The Demonstrators” brilliantly illuminates the subtle tactics of, and clues left behind by, criminalized acts of whiteness. In so doing, Welty’s masterful crime story pays homage to classic noir artists such as Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and Alfred Hitchcock.Less

Seerman: the rise of the psychic detective

Neil Cornwell

in Odoevsky's Four Pathways into Modern Fiction: A Comparative Study

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed ... More

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.Less

Waiting: Mysterious Circumstances

Theodore Martin

in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present

Chapter 3 investigates what happens when contemporary time is felt to be a time of seemingly interminable waiting. I show how this question has become central to the contemporary detective novel, ... More

Chapter 3 investigates what happens when contemporary time is felt to be a time of seemingly interminable waiting. I show how this question has become central to the contemporary detective novel, which depicts the temporality of waiting as both a symptom of and a hedge against the cultural logic of uncertainty that dominates our current risk society. Skeptical of the sense of indeterminacy that enthralls and confounds our contemporary moment, recent detective novels by Vikram Chandra, Michael Chabon, and China Miéville, I argue, use the logic of the wait to solve the mysteries of contemporary time.Less

An Error in Canonicity, or A Fuller Story of Faulkner’s Return to Print Culture, 1944–1951

John N. Duvall

in Faulkner and Print Culture

Although Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 The Portable Faulkner is often credited with reviving Faulkner’s reputation, this essay explores the impact of another publication from that same year, Faulkner’s “An ... More

Although Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 The Portable Faulkner is often credited with reviving Faulkner’s reputation, this essay explores the impact of another publication from that same year, Faulkner’s “An Error in Chemistry,” which appeared as the second-prize winner in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s first story contest. Between 1944 and 1951, a key moment in the process of Faulkner’s canonization, Frederic Dannay (one-half of the team that wrote under the name “Ellery Queen”) published and discussed Faulkner’s fiction in EQMM, as well as in anthologies and critical studies. In advocating for the importance of Faulkner’s fiction, Dannay claimed it for the detective genre and placed it alongside stories by such popular writers as Agatha Christie and Ross Macdonald. Faulkner’s appearance in these products stamped with the Ellery Queen brand helped bridge the divide between modernism and mass culture and laid the ground for the paperback reissuing of Faulkner’s major fiction.Less

Introduction

Cynthia S. Hamilton

in Sara Paretsky: Detective fiction as trauma literature

Assessments of Paretsky’s limitations as both a feminist and a social critic are bound up with assumptions about whether the hard-boiled formula she employs has the capacity to articulate a radical ... More

Assessments of Paretsky’s limitations as both a feminist and a social critic are bound up with assumptions about whether the hard-boiled formula she employs has the capacity to articulate a radical or subversive message. This is a debate with a long history, and although the work of Todorov, Moretti, and Porter remain influential, more recent assessments of the hard-boiled formula by Pepper, McCracken, and Walton and Jones have been less willing to condemn it on the basis of theoretical limitations. This book examines Paretsky’s work within the context of the current debate over the political possibilities and subversive potential of detective fiction, and recognises that Paretsky’s transformation of the hard-boiled formula is more profound than the gender politics with which she is associated. With an MBA and a PhD in History, Paretsky brings a unique perspective to the genre as well as an impressive range of reference and understanding.Less

Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment

Akane Kawakami

in Patrick Modiano

This chapter explores the relationship between Modiano’s novels and ‘popular’ genres such as detective fiction, showing how their resemblance results in a readability which works in Modiano’s favour. ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between Modiano’s novels and ‘popular’ genres such as detective fiction, showing how their resemblance results in a readability which works in Modiano’s favour. However, Modiano’s detective figures turn out to be ‘postmodern’ detectives who repeatedly fail to solve the mysteries they are asked to take on, or are distracted from the task at hand to end up parodying detective fiction, or autobiography, or even the Proustian quest for the self. The disappointment felt by the reader who has read Modiano’s novel as a detective novel, as an autobiography or a post-Proustian Proust novel is examined as a consequence of postmodern parody or experimentation. Modiano’s parodying of various different genres – usually of a very gentle kind – is discussed in detail, as is his slightly mischievous use of his own forename, ‘Patrick’.Less

Introduction: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature

Mark Silver

in Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937

This book examines the responses of Japanese authors to the problem of writing in the borrowed genre of detective fiction. It considers the implications of Japan's deliberate policy of Westernization ... More

This book examines the responses of Japanese authors to the problem of writing in the borrowed genre of detective fiction. It considers the implications of Japan's deliberate policy of Westernization for crime literature, with particular emphasis on how Japanese writers were forced to assume the role of imitator by their choice of genre. It argues that the development of detective fiction in Japan is a form of literary borrowing between “unequal” cultures, citing Edogawa Ranpo's novella The Pomegranate (Zakuro, 1934) as an example. Through its analysis of the Japanese detective story, the book highlights the complexity of cultural borrowing as well as imitation and anxiety in literature.Less

Anxieties of Influence: Edogawa Ranpo’s Horrifying Hybrids

Mark Silver

in Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937

This chapter examines the detective fiction and critical essays produced by Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965) and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Ranpo is the most prominent detective story writer ... More

This chapter examines the detective fiction and critical essays produced by Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965) and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Ranpo is the most prominent detective story writer of the generation that followed Okamoto Kidō. His imaginings (and his readers' enthusiastic consumption of them) seem to be inflected with anxieties about Japanese Westernization, and these anxieties translated into a persistent fascination with guilty impersonation and the monstrosity of cultural hybrids. This chapter first provides a background on Ranpo's career before discussing some of Ranpo's works, including his 1929 novel Shadowy Beast, that show his preoccupation with impersonation, cultural hybridity, and ambivalent longing for the West. It also considers the role played by the magazine Shinseinen (New Youth) in Ranpo's development as a writer and in the more general development of Japanese detective fiction between World wars I and II.Less

The Fin-de-Siècle Detective: ‘But My Job Don’t End There’

Caroline Reitz

in The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

This chapter re-examines late nineteenth-century detective fiction. It challenges views of the genre as a conservative phenomenon that reassures its readers by exposing and then vanquishing threats ... More

This chapter re-examines late nineteenth-century detective fiction. It challenges views of the genre as a conservative phenomenon that reassures its readers by exposing and then vanquishing threats to the social order. Through analysing a range of detective fiction, involving male and female detectives, it highlights the frailties of the specialist knowledge the detective processes, and how it is more often the case that the genre testifies to the inadequacy of professional knowledge to apprehend and control the world, pointing a persisting and threatening sense of violence and social chaos that eludes the detective’s grasp.Less

Public and Private Eyes

Lawrence M Friedman

in Law and Popular Culture

This chapter examines the relation between detective and mystery fiction and law. It mentions that the origin of the detective story and the law against blackmail date from about the same time, ... More

This chapter examines the relation between detective and mystery fiction and law. It mentions that the origin of the detective story and the law against blackmail date from about the same time, roughly during the first half of the 19th century. It explains that the evolution of detective and mystery fiction was influenced by crime rates and public perceptions of crime and that it had influenced changes in the images of law and it may have even led to changes in law.Less

Private dicks: science fiction meets detection in Gun, With Occasional Music

James Peacock

in Jonathan Lethem

This chapter argues that Lethem's debut novel, Gun, With Occasional Music brings together science fiction and detective fiction (or Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler) quite deliberately and ... More

This chapter argues that Lethem's debut novel, Gun, With Occasional Music brings together science fiction and detective fiction (or Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler) quite deliberately and ostentatiously in order to explore key ideas in his work – the role of technology, amnesia, and the loss of community. It ends with a discussion of the extent to which Lethem's melding of genres might be called “postmodern” and suggests that the term “critical dystopia” is an appropriate one for this and other Lethem novels.Less