The Art of Detective Fiction
eBook - PDF

The Art of Detective Fiction

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

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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Yes, you can access The Art of Detective Fiction by NA NA in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Notes on the Contributors
  8. Introduction
  9. 1 Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl
  10. 2 Body Language: a Study of Death and Gender in Crime Fiction
  11. 3 Fascination and Nausea: Finding Out the Hard-Boiled Way
  12. 4 The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction’s Golden Age
  13. 5 Sherlock’s Children: the Birth of the Series
  14. 6 Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction
  15. 7 The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction
  16. 8 The Detective as Clown: a Taxonomy
  17. 9 Mean Streets and English Gardens
  18. 10 Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime Fiction: Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure
  19. 11 Desires and Devices: On Women Detectives in Fiction
  20. 12 A Band of Sisters
  21. 13 An Urban Myth: Fantomas and the Surrealists
  22. 14 Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Intertextual Crimes
  23. 15 Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction
  24. 16 Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading
  25. Index