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The Art of Detective Fiction
About this book
In the hands of many of the great writers, the unravelling of mystery is only one strand within a complex project. Other things get unravelled, too - the belief in a rationally explicable world, in the beneficent, ordering force of culture and civilization. Constantly the detective story delights in muddying the waters, in acknowledging the omnipresent possibilities of anarchy and carnage. As a genre, it is supremely able to combine popular appeal with the ability to disturb, provoke and challenge the reader.
The essays in this volume all pay tribute to, and seek to account for, the astonishing durability of the detective story as a narrative genre. They range generously, taking a variety of theoretical approaches and including detective fiction in languages other than English, but particular attention is paid to the 'Golden Age' of English detective story-writing and to the 'hard-boiled' American version of the genre. This is a collection that will appeal to the scholar and to the devotee alike; to all those, in fact, who cannot resist the lure of finding out whodunit.
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Information
Topic
Social SciencesIndex
Social SciencesTable of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl
- 2 Body Language: a Study of Death and Gender in Crime Fiction
- 3 Fascination and Nausea: Finding Out the Hard-Boiled Way
- 4 The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction’s Golden Age
- 5 Sherlock’s Children: the Birth of the Series
- 6 Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction
- 7 The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction
- 8 The Detective as Clown: a Taxonomy
- 9 Mean Streets and English Gardens
- 10 Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime Fiction: Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure
- 11 Desires and Devices: On Women Detectives in Fiction
- 12 A Band of Sisters
- 13 An Urban Myth: Fantomas and the Surrealists
- 14 Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Intertextual Crimes
- 15 Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction
- 16 Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading
- Index
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