New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
New Perspectives on Detective Fiction

Author: Casey Cothran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-14

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1317435249

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
New Perspectives on Detective Fiction

Author: Casey Cothran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9781138547650

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge
Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge

Author: Antoine Dechêne

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-16

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 331994469X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon
New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Author:

Publisher: Brill

Published: 2015-06-29

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9401208549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of the most prolific authors of the Victorian period, remains best known for her sensation fiction, but over the course of a long career contributed to a multitude of literary genres, working as a journalist, short story writer and editor, as well as authoring more than eighty novels. This exciting new collection of essays reappraises Braddon’s work and offers a series of new perspectives on her literary productions. The volume is divided into two parts: the first considers Braddon’s seminal sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret; the second examines some of her lesser known fiction, including her first published novel, The Trail of the Serpent, as well as some of her twentieth-century fiction. The first collection of essays on Braddon to appear since 1999, this volume sheds new light on the ‘Queen of the circulating libraries’.

Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction
Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction

Author: Alistair Rolls

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-16

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 100060439X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This book's approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard’s self-styled ‘detective criticism’; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie’s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie’s most famous works. This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction, literary studies and comparative literature.

Her Here
Her Here

Author: Amanda Dennis

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 194265877X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An atmospheric debut novel about one lost young woman’s search for another “Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing.” —Washington Post Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation. Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.

Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World
Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World

Author: Nels Pearson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1317151968

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

Noir
Noir

Author: Robert Coover

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2010-03-04

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1590204557

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Metafiction lustily mates with hard-boiled mystery in this hilarious homage to Raymond Chandler and company.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband's killer—if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappear—if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny. “As his dazzling career continues to demonstrate, Mr. Coover is a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force.” —The New York Times “Like Thomas Pynchon in 2009’s Inherent Vice, Coover pops off laughs on every page.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[An] absurdist take on the hard-boiled detective novel . . . depraved and amusing.” —Kirkus Reviews

Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction
Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction

Author: Jerome H. Delamater

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1997-10-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays explores classic detective fiction from a variety of contemporary viewpoints. Among the diverse perspectives are those which interrogate how the genre reflects social and cultural attitudes and interpret the role of the detective as arbiter of "truth".