Mary Douglas
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199245413
- eISBN:
- 9780191697463
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245413.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
This book is a classic work on the anthropology of the Book of Numbers. Up to now Bible scholars have tended to dismiss Numbers — Wellhausen called it the junk room of the Bible, and most ...
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This book is a classic work on the anthropology of the Book of Numbers. Up to now Bible scholars have tended to dismiss Numbers — Wellhausen called it the junk room of the Bible, and most contemporary commentaries feel called upon to say something about its apparent lack of coherence. This book argues that Numbers is composed of twelve alternating sections of law and narrative arranged in a ring, with each law and narrative section corresponding to its pair on the other side. Notes from a Hebrew scholar confirm the pattern by identifying objectively the beginnings and endings of law and narrative. On this showing Numbers turns out to be an extremely coherent example of a well-known antique rhetorical system. The meaning of the book comes out very differently according to whether it is read linearly or as written, synoptically. This book shows that Numbers is not heavy or obscure but reads like a detective story.Less
This book is a classic work on the anthropology of the Book of Numbers. Up to now Bible scholars have tended to dismiss Numbers — Wellhausen called it the junk room of the Bible, and most contemporary commentaries feel called upon to say something about its apparent lack of coherence. This book argues that Numbers is composed of twelve alternating sections of law and narrative arranged in a ring, with each law and narrative section corresponding to its pair on the other side. Notes from a Hebrew scholar confirm the pattern by identifying objectively the beginnings and endings of law and narrative. On this showing Numbers turns out to be an extremely coherent example of a well-known antique rhetorical system. The meaning of the book comes out very differently according to whether it is read linearly or as written, synoptically. This book shows that Numbers is not heavy or obscure but reads like a detective story.
Neil Cornwell
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719082092
- eISBN:
- 9781781702062
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719082092.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate ‘pathways’, developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic ...
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This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate ‘pathways’, developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the ‘pathways’ observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction.Less
This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate ‘pathways’, developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the ‘pathways’ observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction.
Stefan Petrow
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198201656
- eISBN:
- 9780191674976
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201656.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
In the 19th century, the introduction of the role of detective was met by contempt and uncertainty. Detective methods such as spying were deemed offending particularly in liberal England. Although ...
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In the 19th century, the introduction of the role of detective was met by contempt and uncertainty. Detective methods such as spying were deemed offending particularly in liberal England. Although met by hostility, the number of detectives was increased by 1869 prompting the creation of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Because of the great fear of espionage, the CID adopted a method of prevention instead of detection. This presented new problems as it meant employing secretive methods to disclose a brewing crime. These secretive methods were met by further criticisms that questioned the justifiability of these methods and the usage of the informer. Some criticism drew on the invasion of privacy, the perversion of criminal law to justify the entrapment of a criminal, and the regulations imposed on detectives. In this chapter these criticisms and questions on the role and the influence of detectives are carefully analyzed. The methods employed in the monitoring of criminals such as supervision, spying, are also discussed. The chapter also looks at the formation, development, training, and recruitment of detective police.Less
In the 19th century, the introduction of the role of detective was met by contempt and uncertainty. Detective methods such as spying were deemed offending particularly in liberal England. Although met by hostility, the number of detectives was increased by 1869 prompting the creation of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Because of the great fear of espionage, the CID adopted a method of prevention instead of detection. This presented new problems as it meant employing secretive methods to disclose a brewing crime. These secretive methods were met by further criticisms that questioned the justifiability of these methods and the usage of the informer. Some criticism drew on the invasion of privacy, the perversion of criminal law to justify the entrapment of a criminal, and the regulations imposed on detectives. In this chapter these criticisms and questions on the role and the influence of detectives are carefully analyzed. The methods employed in the monitoring of criminals such as supervision, spying, are also discussed. The chapter also looks at the formation, development, training, and recruitment of detective police.
Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199283514
- eISBN:
- 9780191712715
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283514.003.0007
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter discusses women writers in the early years of the 20th century, who had to learn the classical languages quickly in order to prove that they could compete with men in university ...
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This chapter discusses women writers in the early years of the 20th century, who had to learn the classical languages quickly in order to prove that they could compete with men in university examinations. Their responses to the classics are mediated by English literature, particularly novels by women. May Sinclair revises the plot of the Victorian girl who is prevented from studying by familial pressures. Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain studied Latin and Greek at Oxford for preliminary examinations; both comment on men's use of classical images to express scorn for women at Oxford. Sayers and Brittain draw on the epics of Homer and Virgil, and Aristotle's Poetics, to claim literary status for the popular forms in which they were writing, the detective story and the First World War memoir.Less
This chapter discusses women writers in the early years of the 20th century, who had to learn the classical languages quickly in order to prove that they could compete with men in university examinations. Their responses to the classics are mediated by English literature, particularly novels by women. May Sinclair revises the plot of the Victorian girl who is prevented from studying by familial pressures. Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain studied Latin and Greek at Oxford for preliminary examinations; both comment on men's use of classical images to express scorn for women at Oxford. Sayers and Brittain draw on the epics of Homer and Virgil, and Aristotle's Poetics, to claim literary status for the popular forms in which they were writing, the detective story and the First World War memoir.
John Wilson Foster
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232833
- eISBN:
- 9780191716454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232833.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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.
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.
Barbara Czarniawska
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198296140
- eISBN:
- 9780191716584
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296140.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
This book provides an alternative perspective on organization studies, introducing an approach that draws on narratology, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology, contrasting it with the ...
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This book provides an alternative perspective on organization studies, introducing an approach that draws on narratology, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology, contrasting it with the assumptions of the positivist social science. It reflects on such issues as possibility of combining narrative and scientific knowledge, the presence and absence of plot in organization studies, the dominance of the realistic stylization in organization studies, the relationship between organization studies and detective stories, and the challenge of polyphony in organization studies. The aim of the book is to demonstrate how the art of persuasion (as opposed to the simple presentation of facts) can be deployed in social sciences in general and in management and organization studies in particular. Management and organization studies confront the world that is polyphonic and polysemic. The task of the discipline is to render this state of affairs in adequate texts.Less
This book provides an alternative perspective on organization studies, introducing an approach that draws on narratology, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology, contrasting it with the assumptions of the positivist social science. It reflects on such issues as possibility of combining narrative and scientific knowledge, the presence and absence of plot in organization studies, the dominance of the realistic stylization in organization studies, the relationship between organization studies and detective stories, and the challenge of polyphony in organization studies. The aim of the book is to demonstrate how the art of persuasion (as opposed to the simple presentation of facts) can be deployed in social sciences in general and in management and organization studies in particular. Management and organization studies confront the world that is polyphonic and polysemic. The task of the discipline is to render this state of affairs in adequate texts.
Martin Innes
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199259427
- eISBN:
- 9780191698613
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259427.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
This book provides a unique insight into how police detectives investigate and solve murders. Based upon fieldwork observation of murder squads at work, interviews with detectives and detailed ...
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This book provides a unique insight into how police detectives investigate and solve murders. Based upon fieldwork observation of murder squads at work, interviews with detectives and detailed analysis of police case files, it provides an original account of the practices and processes involved in the investigation of homicides, as well as some of the problems that are often encountered in the conduct of this work. Drawing upon detailed empirical data collected, the book develops a conceptual framework for understanding the methods that detectives seek to utilise in order to identify suspects and construct a case against them. Situating such work in its social and legal context this major study shows how interviews, forensic evidence, and other investigative techniques are used by detectives to manufacture a narrative of the crime that sets out how the incident took place, and who did what to whom. In so doing, the book does much to further our understandings of detective work, how detectives understand their role, the problems they encounter and the solutions they manufacture to solve these problems.Less
This book provides a unique insight into how police detectives investigate and solve murders. Based upon fieldwork observation of murder squads at work, interviews with detectives and detailed analysis of police case files, it provides an original account of the practices and processes involved in the investigation of homicides, as well as some of the problems that are often encountered in the conduct of this work. Drawing upon detailed empirical data collected, the book develops a conceptual framework for understanding the methods that detectives seek to utilise in order to identify suspects and construct a case against them. Situating such work in its social and legal context this major study shows how interviews, forensic evidence, and other investigative techniques are used by detectives to manufacture a narrative of the crime that sets out how the incident took place, and who did what to whom. In so doing, the book does much to further our understandings of detective work, how detectives understand their role, the problems they encounter and the solutions they manufacture to solve these problems.
Barbara Czarniawska
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198296140
- eISBN:
- 9780191716584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296140.003.0006
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
Many analogies can be established between detective stories and organization studies: a preference for realist style, a construction of a text around problem-solving in a social context, and an ...
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Many analogies can be established between detective stories and organization studies: a preference for realist style, a construction of a text around problem-solving in a social context, and an analogy between the researcher and the detective. These similarities may suggest that similar ways of emplotment can be used.Less
Many analogies can be established between detective stories and organization studies: a preference for realist style, a construction of a text around problem-solving in a social context, and an analogy between the researcher and the detective. These similarities may suggest that similar ways of emplotment can be used.
Andrew Glazzard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474431293
- eISBN:
- 9781474453769
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, ...
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The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war and secrecy.Less
The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war and secrecy.
Michael T. Gilmore
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195157765
- eISBN:
- 9780199787784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157765.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter looks at popular forms closely identified with American culture. It reinterprets the Western, the detective story, and the celebrity novel, and finds that each genre is built on a ...
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This chapter looks at popular forms closely identified with American culture. It reinterprets the Western, the detective story, and the celebrity novel, and finds that each genre is built on a grammar of visibility. Each moves toward an outcome in which everything is known. The authors discussed include Poe, Cooper, and Fanny Fern.Less
This chapter looks at popular forms closely identified with American culture. It reinterprets the Western, the detective story, and the celebrity novel, and finds that each genre is built on a grammar of visibility. Each moves toward an outcome in which everything is known. The authors discussed include Poe, Cooper, and Fanny Fern.
J. M. Beattie
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199695164
- eISBN:
- 9780191738746
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695164.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This is the first intensive study of the Bow Street runners, a group of men established by Henry Fielding, in the middle of the eighteenth century with the financial support of the government to ...
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This is the first intensive study of the Bow Street runners, a group of men established by Henry Fielding, in the middle of the eighteenth century with the financial support of the government to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London. They were developed over the following decades by his half‐brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London. They were, I argue, detectives in all but name. At the same time, Fielding created a magistrates’ court that for the first time was open to the public at stated times every day. A second, intimately related theme in the book concerns attitudes and ideas about the policing of London more broadly, particularly from the 1780s, when the detective and prosecutorial work of the runners came to be increasingly opposed by arguments in favour of the prevention of crime by surveillance and other means. The last three chapters of the book continue to follow the runners’ work, but at the same time they are concerned with discussions of the larger structure of policing in London – in parliament, in the Home Office, and in the press. These discussions were to intensify after 1815, in the face of a sharp increase in criminal prosecutions. They led – in a far from straightforward way – to a fundamental reconstitution of the basis of policing in the capital by Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police act of 1829. The runners were not immediately affected by the creation of the New Police, but indirectly it led to their disbandment a decade later.Less
This is the first intensive study of the Bow Street runners, a group of men established by Henry Fielding, in the middle of the eighteenth century with the financial support of the government to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London. They were developed over the following decades by his half‐brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London. They were, I argue, detectives in all but name. At the same time, Fielding created a magistrates’ court that for the first time was open to the public at stated times every day. A second, intimately related theme in the book concerns attitudes and ideas about the policing of London more broadly, particularly from the 1780s, when the detective and prosecutorial work of the runners came to be increasingly opposed by arguments in favour of the prevention of crime by surveillance and other means. The last three chapters of the book continue to follow the runners’ work, but at the same time they are concerned with discussions of the larger structure of policing in London – in parliament, in the Home Office, and in the press. These discussions were to intensify after 1815, in the face of a sharp increase in criminal prosecutions. They led – in a far from straightforward way – to a fundamental reconstitution of the basis of policing in the capital by Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police act of 1829. The runners were not immediately affected by the creation of the New Police, but indirectly it led to their disbandment a decade later.
Mark Silver
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824831882
- eISBN:
- 9780824869397
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824831882.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This book argues for a reassessment of existing models of literary influence between “unequal” cultures. Because the detective story had no pre-existing native equivalent in Japan, the genre's ...
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This book argues for a reassessment of existing models of literary influence between “unequal” cultures. Because the detective story had no pre-existing native equivalent in Japan, the genre's formulaic structure acted as a distinctive cultural marker, making plain the process of its incorporation into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese letters. The book tells the story of Japan's adoption of this new Western literary form at a time when the nation was also remaking itself in the image of the Western powers. It calls into question conventional notions of cultural domination and resistance, demonstrating the variety of possible modes for cultural borrowing, the surprising vagaries of intercultural transfer, and the power of the local contexts in which “imitation” occurs. The book begins by analyzing Tokugawa courtroom narratives and early Meiji biographies of female criminals (dokufu-mono, or “poison-woman stories”), which dominated popular crime writing in Japan before the detective story's arrival. It then traces the mid-Meiji absorption of French, British, and American detective novels into Japanese literary culture through the quirky translations of muckraking journalist Kuroiwa Ruikō. Subsequent chapters take up a series of detective stories nostalgically set in the old city of Edo by Okamoto Kidō (a Kabuki playwright inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes) and the erotic, grotesque, and macabre works of Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen-name punned on “Edgar Allan Poe”.Less
This book argues for a reassessment of existing models of literary influence between “unequal” cultures. Because the detective story had no pre-existing native equivalent in Japan, the genre's formulaic structure acted as a distinctive cultural marker, making plain the process of its incorporation into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese letters. The book tells the story of Japan's adoption of this new Western literary form at a time when the nation was also remaking itself in the image of the Western powers. It calls into question conventional notions of cultural domination and resistance, demonstrating the variety of possible modes for cultural borrowing, the surprising vagaries of intercultural transfer, and the power of the local contexts in which “imitation” occurs. The book begins by analyzing Tokugawa courtroom narratives and early Meiji biographies of female criminals (dokufu-mono, or “poison-woman stories”), which dominated popular crime writing in Japan before the detective story's arrival. It then traces the mid-Meiji absorption of French, British, and American detective novels into Japanese literary culture through the quirky translations of muckraking journalist Kuroiwa Ruikō. Subsequent chapters take up a series of detective stories nostalgically set in the old city of Edo by Okamoto Kidō (a Kabuki playwright inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes) and the erotic, grotesque, and macabre works of Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen-name punned on “Edgar Allan Poe”.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199797578
- eISBN:
- 9780199932412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199797578.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century 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, ...
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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
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.
Mererid Puw Davies
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199242757
- eISBN:
- 9780191697180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242757.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter addresses an alternative, 19th-century comic and romantic Bluebeard tradition represented by Eugenie Marlitt's novella ‘Blaubart’ (1866), the first German Bluebeard text known to be ...
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This chapter addresses an alternative, 19th-century comic and romantic Bluebeard tradition represented by Eugenie Marlitt's novella ‘Blaubart’ (1866), the first German Bluebeard text known to be written by a woman. Marlitt's apparently superficial, if entertaining, ‘Blaubart’ encodes some major changes in the Blaubartmärchen. Violent force is replaced by the constraints of love; and what used to be a shameful secret is made visible and yet invisible, as a work of art. At another level, the whole notion of secrecy is transferred onto the genre of the novella itself, which is a kind of detective story, a genre which comes to be associated with later Bluebeard versions.Less
This chapter addresses an alternative, 19th-century comic and romantic Bluebeard tradition represented by Eugenie Marlitt's novella ‘Blaubart’ (1866), the first German Bluebeard text known to be written by a woman. Marlitt's apparently superficial, if entertaining, ‘Blaubart’ encodes some major changes in the Blaubartmärchen. Violent force is replaced by the constraints of love; and what used to be a shameful secret is made visible and yet invisible, as a work of art. At another level, the whole notion of secrecy is transferred onto the genre of the novella itself, which is a kind of detective story, a genre which comes to be associated with later Bluebeard versions.
Cynthia S. Hamilton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719096952
- eISBN:
- 9781781708729
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719096952.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This is the first book-length study of Sara Paretsky’s detective fiction. Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula ...
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This is the first book-length study of Sara Paretsky’s detective fiction. Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. She uses contemporary instances of corporate malfeasance and political corruption to indict the indifference, inadequacy, and betrayals of institutions charged with promoting the public good. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. She not only uses her detective to examine the dynamics and impact of coercive power, but also to explore potential strategies for resistance. Paretsky’s work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts—whether they be personal, institutional, or national—that authorise the ‘forgetting’ of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky’s achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction. Paretsky has already been recognised as an important figure in the development of the hard-boiled tradition, but not, as this indicates, for all the right reasons. The book is essential reading for students and critics of detective fiction.Less
This is the first book-length study of Sara Paretsky’s detective fiction. Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. She uses contemporary instances of corporate malfeasance and political corruption to indict the indifference, inadequacy, and betrayals of institutions charged with promoting the public good. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. She not only uses her detective to examine the dynamics and impact of coercive power, but also to explore potential strategies for resistance. Paretsky’s work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts—whether they be personal, institutional, or national—that authorise the ‘forgetting’ of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky’s achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction. Paretsky has already been recognised as an important figure in the development of the hard-boiled tradition, but not, as this indicates, for all the right reasons. The book is essential reading for students and critics of detective fiction.
Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and ...
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Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and American short-story tradition, where the emergent sub-genres of horror story, science fiction, and detective tale mingled productively in the early part of the century. In many of the best tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, artists of various kinds discover the destructive and damning qualities of their own creations. What is repeatedly shown in these tales of transgression is how the secret skill that makes the protagonist independent and severs his social ties becomes an obsessional end in itself and masters the master. It is not just that, as a matter of their personal experience, Herman Melville was able to describe actual labour whereas Elizabeth Gaskell could give us only the domestic sickbed or the riot at the factory gates.Less
Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and American short-story tradition, where the emergent sub-genres of horror story, science fiction, and detective tale mingled productively in the early part of the century. In many of the best tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, artists of various kinds discover the destructive and damning qualities of their own creations. What is repeatedly shown in these tales of transgression is how the secret skill that makes the protagonist independent and severs his social ties becomes an obsessional end in itself and masters the master. It is not just that, as a matter of their personal experience, Herman Melville was able to describe actual labour whereas Elizabeth Gaskell could give us only the domestic sickbed or the riot at the factory gates.
Robert Miklitsch (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038594
- eISBN:
- 9780252096518
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038594.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating ...
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Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle. But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. This book is a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes. Chapters analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women's pulp fiction, as well as investigate Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers' collective reconsideration unwinds the impact of hot-button topics like race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality.Less
Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle. But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. This book is a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre's iconic style, history, and themes. Chapters analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women's pulp fiction, as well as investigate Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers' collective reconsideration unwinds the impact of hot-button topics like race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality.
L. Andrew Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037092
- eISBN:
- 9780252094385
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037092.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four ...
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Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. The book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, the book places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock. It reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.Less
Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. The book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, the book places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock. It reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.
Graham Denyer Willis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780520285705
- eISBN:
- 9780520961135
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520285705.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of ...
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This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and practical terms. This alignment reveals a system of governance in which who can live and who can die is largely defined by a de facto and mutually observed consensus between the state and the PCC, most intensely felt in the informally urbanized parts of the city. And yet that consensus can itself be killed, breaking apart into moments of acute and violent crisis in the city in which police and supposed PCC affiliates are killed by each other with near abandon. São Paulo's cyclical pattern of violence, which has long periods of relative peace punctuated by violent crisis, is rooted in the empirical practice of sovereignty by consensus that is deeply connected to the two prominent pressures of the contemporary moment, namely, security and democracy.Less
This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and practical terms. This alignment reveals a system of governance in which who can live and who can die is largely defined by a de facto and mutually observed consensus between the state and the PCC, most intensely felt in the informally urbanized parts of the city. And yet that consensus can itself be killed, breaking apart into moments of acute and violent crisis in the city in which police and supposed PCC affiliates are killed by each other with near abandon. São Paulo's cyclical pattern of violence, which has long periods of relative peace punctuated by violent crisis, is rooted in the empirical practice of sovereignty by consensus that is deeply connected to the two prominent pressures of the contemporary moment, namely, security and democracy.
George C. Browder
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195104790
- eISBN:
- 9780199854462
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195104790.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Routinization works best when one has distance, as at a bureaucrat's desk. When one has direct contact with the victims, the key process involves dehumanization. Abstraction, dehumanization, and ...
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Routinization works best when one has distance, as at a bureaucrat's desk. When one has direct contact with the victims, the key process involves dehumanization. Abstraction, dehumanization, and brutalization taken together best describe what happens. This process is a double-edged sword: in denying the humanity of the victim and, therefore, his right to moral consideration, the victimizer brutalizes himself as well, weakening his moral restraints. The categorization of enemies prescribed by Nazi ideology and sanctioned through fully controlled media created the psychological environment to generate such processes. As one shall see, both police and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) created their own evidence and convinced themselves that the Nazi-designated enemies were indeed threats to society. The following social history of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) detectives shows how authorization, bolstering, routinization, and dehumanization contributed to their evolution. Throughout the process, professional detectives and civil servants experienced an uneven, sometimes jarring, sometimes gradual transformation from apolitical professionals to “Gestapo men.”.Less
Routinization works best when one has distance, as at a bureaucrat's desk. When one has direct contact with the victims, the key process involves dehumanization. Abstraction, dehumanization, and brutalization taken together best describe what happens. This process is a double-edged sword: in denying the humanity of the victim and, therefore, his right to moral consideration, the victimizer brutalizes himself as well, weakening his moral restraints. The categorization of enemies prescribed by Nazi ideology and sanctioned through fully controlled media created the psychological environment to generate such processes. As one shall see, both police and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) created their own evidence and convinced themselves that the Nazi-designated enemies were indeed threats to society. The following social history of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) detectives shows how authorization, bolstering, routinization, and dehumanization contributed to their evolution. Throughout the process, professional detectives and civil servants experienced an uneven, sometimes jarring, sometimes gradual transformation from apolitical professionals to “Gestapo men.”.
