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Crime Fiction as World Literature
Abstract
This article explores crime fiction within a world literature framework. It argues that the study of national traditions can blind us to the dialogue across borders and languages between texts and authors. It proposes a reading practice that aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of this truly global genre.
... El planteo de que los estudios sobre el género policial, hasta el día de hoy, se han enmarcado fundamentalmente en trabajos sobre literaturas nacionales o regionales es afirmado no solo por Nilsson, Damrosch y D'haen, sino también por Stewart King. Este crítico, de hecho, posee un significativo artículo, publicado en 2014 y titulado de igual manera que el libro de aquellos tres autores, en que expone algunas ideas para un abordaje de la literatura policial como literatura mundial (King 2014). Entre ellas, King plantea que una condición mundial del género policial debe medirse no solo a través de números de ventas y de traducciones a escala global, sino también por medio de referencias intertextuales (2014: 11) -afirmación sensata pero que, en todo caso, nos devuelve al linaje más tradicional de los estudios comparados. ...
... Podemos pensar en trabajos críticos producidos en distintas partes del mundo y que justamente efectúan un análisis del género a partir de esta suerte de canon de la narrativa policial -canon que varía de un crítico a otro, por supuesto, aunque los nombres principales suelen mantenerse-, como los de los norteamericanos Knight (1980) y Priestman (1990), el español Valle (2006) o incluso los ensayos de escritores como Škvorecký (1967Škvorecký ( ) o Piglia (19792006). Desde luego, no queremos decir que el estudio de la literatura policial como literatura mundial consista meramente en una selección de un puñado de obras canónicas -tal como King (2014) postula que no hay que hacer-, aunque, así como Alexander (1990) plantea que la lectura de los clásicos en el campo de la sociología sienta una base común de entendimiento entre los profesionales de la disciplina, algo similar podríamos sostener sobre un núcleo de ficciones que cualquier persona que pretende discutir en el área del género policial debería conocer razonablemente 8 . ...
The article proposes an approach to crime fiction and recent debates around the problem of world literature. After determining the incorporation of the global as a theme in some fictions, evincing the place of enunciation of the analyst, and briefly reviewing the contributions that explore that intersection, two approaches are offered. On the one hand, and following the works by Casanova and Moretti, crime fiction is considered from a global and asymmetric perspective. On the other, and inspired by Luhmann, another theoretical approach is elaborated from a systemic perspective.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
This Open Access book considers the cultural representation of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance with a focus on the transnational dimension of our contemporary visual and literary cultures in English. Contributors address concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in the Anglophone world through an analysis of memoirs, films, TV series, and crime and literary fiction across India, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK. Chapters explore literary and media displays of precarious conditions to examine whether these are exacerbated when intersecting with gender and ethnic identities, thus resulting in structural forms of vulnerability that generate and justify oppression, as well as forms of individual or collective resistance and/or resilience. Substantial insights are drawn from Animal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights Studies, Post-Humanism and Postcolonialism. This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Culture, Literature and History.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
This chapter explores how the idea of womanhood intersects with concepts of vulnerability and resistance in two feminist dystopian novels by South Asian writer Manjula Padmanabhan, Escape (2008) and its sequel The Island of Lost Girls (2015). It addresses how Padmanabhan brings out the fluid gendered resistance in the context of female genocide in India, in the dimensions of techno culture. By looking at sexual violence through the lenses of aligned resilience in solidarity as an analytical tool, through which the victims achieve empowerment, we argue that the presence of trans protagonists in the novels brings originality to the dystopian trope.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
Emma Donoghue’s novel Room narrates the story of Ma, a 26-year-old woman who has been imprisoned for seven years in an eleven-by-eleven-foot soundproof garden shed in an unnamed place in America with her 5-year-old boy, Jack. This present chapter deals with the abusive conditions of oppression and confinement that Ma and Jack must face both in captivity and after escape, the impact that these conditions have on their body, psyche and social life, the different practices of resistance that mother and child enact to cope with them and the transforming process they must undergo to bounce back from them. Judith Butler’s Theory of Vulnerability helps us understand how Emma Donoghue resorts to the notion of vulnerability in resistance to shape Room characters’ subjectivity, Julia Kristeva’s Theory of the Abject lets us explain why Ma and Jack fall into the category of socially disturbing elements in a patriarchal symbolic order and Boris Cyrulnik’s Theory of Resilience is paramount to examine the process that the protagonists must undergo to overcome trauma.KeywordsEmma Donoghue
Room
ViolenceVulnerabilityResistanceResilience
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
In this chapter, I investigate how Joyce Carol Oates has conceptualised martyrdom in terms of gender and non-human animal perspectives in “Martyrdom” (1994). I suggest that a biopolitical approach to gendered violence and to the instrumentalisation of animal bodies allows the revelation of systemic and ontological violence exerted over oppressed subjectivities. This violence is of an anthropocentric and androcentric nature and, therefore, not exclusive to the North American context. Judith Butler’s and Sarah Bracke’s remapping of subjectivity as relational and interdependent politics provides a deconstructive alternative to the binary coding which positions the male human as sole active agent. Butler and Bracke propose policies of resilience and vulnerability as operative processes in the struggle for radical resistance counteracting/supplementing the discourse of martyrdom.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
The success of Kate Atkinson’s crime fiction series (starting with Case Histories , 2004, and continuing with Big Sky , 2019) brought Jackson Brodie to the TV under the title Case Histories , commissioned by the BBC for one season (airing in 2011), and a second season (in 2013, slightly changing in format). Throughout the fiction series, Brodie has been constructed as a vulnerable subject, continuing a tradition of the second half of the twentieth century that broke up with the hard-boiled image of the male detective. The question under scrutiny here is how the fiction character has been modelled to construct its television counterpart for a transnational audience. Taking into consideration issues of vulnerability, accountability and its humane social formulation, this analysis will show how the changes needed for the TV seems to erase whatever social critique appears in the fiction series.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
In this chapter, I analyse the testimonies of some survivors gathered in Justice for Magdalenes’ Oral History Project (2013) and Kathy O’Beirne’s autobiography Kathy’s Story. A Childhood Hell inside the Magdalen Laundries (2005). The narrative focuses on the life of one Magdalene survivor during her confinement and after her release, where the concepts of vulnerability, resistance and resilience gain strength. As an international political forum, the Project allows us to see how Magdalene Laundries, employed as instruments of power, rendered thousands of women in a vulnerable and precarious condition which they are still fighting to overcome. Following Judith Butler, vulnerability is part of resistance, and it is through our speech and bodily acts that we can resist social norms and precarity. Considering resilience and resistance as complementary concepts, this chapter explores how these women resisted vulnerability and if they were offered help in the aftermath of their release.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
Vulnerability has been traditionally opposed to resistance and agency. However, this proposition has been contested recently as a simplistic opposition of the binary kind: my argument is predicated on the idea that Andrea Arnold is a filmmaker who problematizes these concepts through a self-conscious critical gaze, in particular, in her film Red Road (2008). Drawing from Teresa De Lauretis’ approach to the technologies of gender, I will pay attention to how Arnold inverts the roles traditionally assigned in film: in this case, it is the male character the one under the female gaze, a strategy used by Arnold to question the myth of the sovereign subject. My focus will be on how Arnold presents her characters as vulnerable but always with full agency, and never as victims.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
This chapter addresses the systemic precarisation of individuals through the examination of Holy Orders (2013), the sixth title in Benjamin Black’s “Quirke series”. This crime novel describes the multi-layered precarity of Ireland’s travellers, that appear, I argue, as archives of the failing of infrastructural norms and paradigms of pathogenic vulnerability. Similarly, the story captures the corrupted network of control and influence sustained by the Catholic Church and its concomitant rule of silence, whose dysfunctionality generates a string of parallel justice. In my analysis, I will first explore how the failure of Ireland’s network of infrastructural support has prevailed throughout time, decimating the lives of some of its most vulnerable individuals. Then, I will trace the vigilantism that, as a convention in crime fiction, appears as a product of such deficiency and the troubling questions posed for the contemporary reader.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
This chapter explores Ausma Zehanat Khan’s fourth police procedural, A Dangerous Crossing (2018), as an example of human rights fiction that casts a “disobedient gaze” on the current global refugee situation. Using the conventions of the crime genre, the novel manages to provide a detailed analysis of the gender vulnerability of Syrian refugees stranded in Greek camps and mobilises a transformative kind of empathy by drawing alternative affective economies that help readers expand the limit of our imagination. The chapter argues that Khan’s refugee advocacy rests on envisioning the human within those who are depicted as nonhuman in media and political descriptions of forced migration in the context of increased border securitisation.
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
Following feminist critical posthuman thinking (Braidotti, Vint, Ferrando), this chapter analyses two recent popular science fiction movies portraying female characters that embody the concept of the vulnerable posthuman: Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell (2017). In spite of the fact that in these two movies the posthuman (female) characters are depicted as vulnerable beings apparently doomed to privileging and perpetuating the normative idea of the body in terms of gender and race, they still manage to somehow disrupt established configurations of power by offering audiences an unfamiliar experience. Viewers see life through the posthuman perspective thanks to filmic strategies, such as identification or sympathy, enabling us to temporarily refuse normative human ethics and to understand the posthuman subject as it is, with its alien/transhuman body and non-normative actions and desires.KeywordsScience fiction filmPosthuman subjectivityTranshuman
Under the Skin
Ghost in the Shell
... Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a wellanchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005;Ascari 2007;King 2014;, who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime. ...
The British Empire has become a new trope in neo-Victorian studies, incorporating a postcolonial trans-national approach to the re-writing of the Victorian past. Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River is set in Australia in the early nineteenth century when issues of transportation and colonisation coalesce with the fight for survival under precarious conditions. The Secret River is the story of the confrontation between colonisers and colonised people in terms of gender and vulnerability. This chapter analyses the role of Empire in the construction of a British identity associated with civilisation and that of the native population. Following Judith Butler’s theories, my discussion is organised around two main topics: Australian history and narratives of recollection, and gender identity and vulnerability both in white settlers and indigenous communities. My contention is that both sides became involved in a relationship of mutual vulnerability.KeywordsTrans-nationalVulnerabilityGenderNeo-Victorian
The Secret River
Crime fiction is a genre that commonly incorporates important sociocultural dimensions. When crime fiction works are translated within the framework of world literature, new audiences are able to expand their knowledge of different cultures and societies, as well as be entertained by the plots and characters. It can thus be a challenge, for translators, to ensure that sociocultural aspects are effectively conveyed. For example, the translation into English of Japanese social and organisational hierarchy depicted in character interactions is particularly complex, given the differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds of readers. This paper explores strategies for translating hierarchy using Hideo Yokoyama’s Dai san no jikō ( The Third Deadline ) as a case study. We propose a methodology to assist translators in adopting a conscious approach to translating hierarchy, which will provide readers with a more nuanced understanding of how hierarchy functions in Japanese society. We demonstrate that the translation of crime fiction can help readers overcome barriers resulting from linguistic and cultural differences to gain a new understanding of different societies.
Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature.
Nordic Noir crime series have enjoyed much popularity and positive critical attention in Britain, as have many other aspects of Scandinavian ways of life, and the extent and nature of this cultural curiosity in the years following the international release of the originary 'Forbrydelsen/The Killing' (2007) deserves further analytical attention. This article investigates one important manner in which culturally specific and ideologically charged content was received and negotiated in Britain in this period by comparing how conceptions of modern fatherhood are expressed in Scandinavian crime drama and British adaptations of the Nordic Noir crime genre. Nordic Noir series based in both cultures can be seen to share a strong thematic focus on fatherhood, especially centred on characters that embody features associated with openly affectionate and hands-on fatherhood, or “modern dads”. However, there are notable differences in how the figure of the modern dad is represented in Scandinavian crime drama and British series that appropriate key genre features of Nordic Noir, which suggests that the construct has undergone what is termed “ideological recontextualisation”. The Scandinavian modern dad characters tend to be heroes, their capacity for involved, selfless love and care for their children unproblematised and uncontested within the story worlds, while their British counterparts are far more suspect entities. Their seemingly close and loving interaction with children may be potentially sexually motivated, immaturely or selfishly handled, or even serve to mask their criminal intent, and they typically turn out to be the villains of the stories. The Scandinavian ideology connected to modern fatherhood appears, then, to have been an object of both fascination and contestation in British culture in this period, and may have been more resistant to undisputed cultural importation than female main characters with attachment issues and woolly jumpers.
This article is an interdisciplinary study of Gérard Delteil’s Les Écœurés, a 2019 novel that was marketed as a “le premier polar en Gilet Jaune.” In this essay, we explore the generic tensions that arise when murder mystery intersects with socioeconomic criticism in our age of advanced capitalism. We argue that Les Écœurés functions differently when read through a sociological prism than it does as a noir or polar. We demonstrate that analysis of social media data shows that Delteil captures quite well and to a large extent reproduces the concerns of the Gilets Jaunes movement, while at the same time showcasing the dispiriting durability of a corrupt establishment. Second, on the level of character, we maintain that in presenting a drably failed bildungsroman, the novel undercuts the importance of any individual agency or élan. And third, we argue that on the level of genre, the text—by sidelining its own murder mystery—raises questions about the force and relevance of crime fiction as a potential agent of social change. Ultimately, we maintain that the very failures in and of Les Écœurés point metatextually to the novel’s position as an artifact of the period and as embodiment of the Gilets Jaunes movement’s likely fate.
Discussing the Catalan crime fiction may appear as a challenging scientific task due to its lacking autochthonous tradition. The scholars exploring this issue have come to conclusion that, even though there were authors such as Rafael Tasis o Manuel de Pedrolo, whose contribution to this literary genre’s solid foundations seems indubitable, Jaume Fuster is the writer responsible for its consolidation in the Catalan literary system in the 1970s. The aim of the present paper is to analyze Jaume Fuster’s De mica en micas’omple la pica in a specific historical context in order to present some of his foreign influences and inspirations. Specifically, it investigates whether the author remained indifferent to external literary products or whether he chose deliberately some of the archi-genre’s elements in order to implement and consolidate crime fiction in Catalonia. For this purpose, we have applied some of the principles of Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory. The results showed that De mica en mica s’omple la pica not only has played a major role in the consolidation of crime fiction but it also placed its author in one of the central positions in the Catalan literary polysystem. Moreover, Fuster tended to interact with different foreign traditions by using in his works modified crime fiction components based on the unique repertory conditioned by the geopolitical situation of Catalonia.
The theme of environmental destruction and human-induced climate change has become a staple of fiction in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This article explores how a particular genre, crime fiction, responds to this challenge. Focusing on two examples of what I call crimate fiction, the article examines the ways in the novels move between the specific social, cultural, political, and environmental space in which the crimes and their detection occur and the larger world in order to foster a form of "eco-cosmopolitanism" among readers.
Within the framework of world literature, crime fiction can be translated, read, and studied by new target audiences to expand their knowledge of different cultures. The translation of Japanese crime fiction into English poses many challenges, especially regarding the socio-cultural aspects. The representation of Japanese social and organisational hierarchy through socio-linguistic features in the character interactions is particularly complex for readers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to understand, and may lead to a reliance on stereotypes. Therefore, a translator needs to give careful consideration to this issue. This paper explores the strategies for translating the hierarchical features of character interactions employed by the translator of 64 (Six Four), a novel by award-winning crime fiction author Hideo Yokoyama. Through this analysis, we propose a guideline to assist translators adopt a conscious approach to translating hierarchy, which will provide readers with a more nuanced understanding of how hierarchy functions in Japanese society. We demonstrate that the translation of crime fiction has the ability to enable readers to overcome barriers resulting from linguistic and cultural differences to gain a new understanding of different societies.
Hynynen argues that Olivier Truc’s Reindeer Police trilogy challenges set notions of national, cultural and ethnic authenticity and national genre traditions. She explores mobility, borders and border crossings in the trilogy from three perspectives: she highlights the novels’ transnational nature, analyses how the trilogy depicts spatial mobility and focuses on how social and ethnic mobility become manifest through the novels’ detectives. The author’s personal trajectory and the novels’ place of publication are placed in relation to the novels’ setting, original language and social commentary, which evidences the transnational nature of the novels. Hynynen’s analysis of geographical border crossing shows that they constitute a prime characteristic of the trilogy, whereas the main characters’ contrasting life stories illustrate border crossing from a cultural identity and ethnicity perspective.
Piipponen, Mäntymäki and Rodi-Risberg suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. They propose that such mobilities and crossings reflect on recent sociocultural developments on local and global levels and communicate specific geopolitical anxieties. They position their own mobilities research perspective within existing crime fiction scholarship, especially within the so-called transnational and spatial turns. Introducing some key observations of mobilities research, they suggest that mobility can be considered both as an object of study in its own right and a critical lens through which contemporary crime narratives can be examined. The chapter identifies several key areas where crime texts engage with types and practices of mobility to offer social critique: crimes across borders and global flows of capital; the means for expanding and curtailing human mobility; and generic exchange and especially the mobilisation of affect through genre hybridisation.
Miranda explores Argentine María Inés Krimer’s trilogy Sangre kosher (2010), Siliconas express (2013) and Sangre fashion (2015) featuring Ruth Epelbaum, the only woman private detective in the Argentine tradition. Miranda claims that the novels problematise the social, political and cultural anxieties of the modern Buenos Aires. Throughout the series, crimes from the past are seen through the lens of present ones, and the novels also reference crimes outside the capital and outside of Argentina. Miranda shows how the trilogy epitomises the capacity of local crime fiction to reflect broader preoccupations transcending national and temporal borders, especially highlighting issues relating to Jewish immigration and the more recent migration from neighbouring countries. Thus, the series ultimately interrogates problematic historical junctures providing a space to make sense of the present.
The 1930s saw an explosion in the publication of crime writing in Italy, but initially readers’ appetite for crime fiction was fed almost entirely by translated imports from the US, Britain and France. Even as publishers began promoting crime writing by Italians, foreign models and settings remained important, and several early Italian writers set their work in foreign countries. This article, which draws on both textual analysis and archival research, examines some foreign-set novels produced by Italian authors during the Fascist years, and seeks to identify the function and appeal of foreign settings in the depiction of criminality in that period. These books, peopled by exotic ‘Others’, comment on corruption, freedom of the press, cultural diversity, racial difference, policing, criminality, as much at home as abroad. The distant settings offered safety and freedom, as well as escapism or distraction, and the opportunity to experiment with genre.
In this text, I suggest an interpretation of crime fiction as a discursive matrix that, although containing critical potential, cannot be claimed as sociological criticism of the transgressions and punishments of social order. In the tension between its critical power and its nature as a product of the cultural industry, I consider that the tendency (on the part of critics and writers) to value the critical aspect of the genre relegates the fact that, concurrently, it constitutes a cultural good of ordinary consumerism in the daily life of the capitalist social order.
Through its repeated references to William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins announces a close textual kinship to this earlier work, one that plays out in terms of a common aesthetic aim of laying bare the naked ugliness of the social forces of power and oppression structuring the societies each represents. This essay argues that while operating in this vein The Story of My Assassins uses elements of the detective fiction genre to critique the structures of power of an early twenty-first-century India whose emergence as a major global economic power has allowed a small minority of its population to garner previously unheard-of levels of wealth and power while leaving an 900 million or so strong underclass subject to myriad forms of brutalization and social marginalization. In doing so, it uses narrative to consider the roles played by sexualized violence, state bureaucracies, and an emergent plutocratic elite in fomenting the defining social inequalities and exclusions of a society it poses as having drifted far from the originary social visions of Gandhi and Nehru.
In the early novels of the Carvalho detective series by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, set in the years of Spain’s transition to democracy, the negotiation of identities and political stance are paramount characterization resources. Given the role of speech in the construction of identity, translations may vary in the readings they afford beyond the detective aspects. We apply the sociolinguistic concepts of identity work and language style (albeit mediated by fictive orality), and the discourse analysis tools of Appraisal Theory, to analyse two working-class characters in Los mares del sur (1979) and in its English (1986) and Croatian (2007) translations.
In Spanish the language style of both characters reflects class allegiance, involvement and tenacity, intense feelings, a direct interpersonal approach and a rejection of altercasting. Their vocabulary and quotations from external sources index their ideology. The English translation is the least aware of identity work through language style and interaction. The characters’ standardized speech shows less involvement, tenacity and intensity. The Croatian translation follows the source text literally; involvement is maintained within a fictive colloquial spoken variety. Both translations maintain directness and a contractive dialogic style, and both make references to class and ideology more explicit.
Crime fiction has been constantly present in Greek popular culture, mainly through translations published in newspapers, magazines and in book form, from the nineteenth century to the present day. While the Anglo-American influence on the development of Greek popular literature as a whole has undoubtedly been paramount since the beginning of the twentieth century, other national traditions have also played an important role. In this article, I provide an overview of cultural transfers between Greek, and French and Italian crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century, taking into account the major influence of French culture and literature in Greece since the Enlightenment, and the common emergence of a new French and Italian crime fiction in translation after the 1990s. In particular, I look at the interplay between translated crime fiction and indigenous Greek texts, focusing on the emergence and consecration of the genre in relation to key texts, agents and events. Drawing on a definition of translation as rewriting, I examine interlingual, as well as intersemiotic practices, showing how the history of the genre in Greece has been (re)written through translation.
Pierre Lemaitre’s thrillers revolve around the domestic. They present crime that invades the domestic sphere, as criminals target the detective’s personal life or, alternatively, criminal behaviours that originate from a traumatic family past. His novels also comment on rape, sexual violence and the disruption of human relations under global capitalism.
In "The Simple Art of Murder" Raymond Chandler makes a distinction between the rule-bound, static and "arid formula" of English writers like Christie and the dynamism and mobility of the American hardboiled novel that is still considered valid today. This article challenges this generic and national division through Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Although Christie is the author most closely associated with the conservative Englishness attributed to this subgenre, this article questions both the Englishness and generic stasis ascribed to Christie and argues that Murder on the Orient Express displays an inherent transnationalism that questions the strict taxonomies that supposedly separate the English clue-puzzle from the American private-eye novel.
In the introduction, the editors look at the internationalization of crime fiction as a recent and historical phenomenon and consider what is at stake for writers who want to use crime fiction to critically reflect upon the changing nature of crime and policing in our contemporary world. We argue that the globalization of crime fiction should not be understood and celebrated as a one-way process whereby the genre moves to populate the globe. Rather, the global implications of the crime and policing practices being depicted, require new forms and strategies of representation to do justice to a rapidly changing world. As such, we pay attention to the ways in which contemporary crime novels thematize the actions of police detectives and their proxies in particular local and national settings across the world, as they grapple with complex crimes and investigations that cross state borders. But we also think about how the globalization of crime and policing is producing new hybrid forms of writing capable, not just of describing these transformations, but also subjecting them to scrutiny and critique.
In this article, modern Crime Fiction is shown to have its origins in translation, and more specifically in translation from a tense national space known, or posing, as American into another tense national space, French this time, in which identity is being reconstructed in terms of alienation and a problematizing of self-knowledge. As French national allegory was refashioned in response to trauma – as a result of Haussmannization in the mid-nineteenth century and of the Second World War a century later – the United States was always present as both ghostly Other and source of Crime Fiction. When Baudelaire translated Poe, he rethought the Paris that Poe had already placed at the centre of his crime-writing world; when Duhamel translated Cheyney and Chase in the wake of the Liberation of Paris, America was again reimagined as a new allegory for the post-war French condition. This paper traces the role of Crime Fiction, and its translation, in the formation of new national allegories; but it also simultaneously traces the rewriting of (French) national allegory in the development of (French) Crime Fiction. It concludes by pursuing this double phenomenon in the contemporary Crime Fiction scene with a review of the national allegory’s interrogation in the context of retranslation.
This article examines the ways in which Catalan crime fiction is entwined with the concepts of world literature, national allegory and translation. Crime novels have been singled out for two reasons: first, because the genre’s origins are steeped in translation; second, because crime novels are often beholden to a particularly strong sense of place. Crime fiction in translation serves as national allegory insofar as it represents and re-presents a nation. The article explores what happens when such novels move beyond their culture of origin, in particular which national allegory is played out, and how it is read in the foreign context. Through an analysis of novels by Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Teresa Solana, this article maps the transformations that national allegories undergo when they are translated from one linguistic context to another: in the case of Capmany’s Traduït de l’americà, from the US to Catalonia; in the case of Solana’s Un crim imperfecte, from Catalonia to the rest of the world. As novels both born and borne in translation, these works point to a truly worldly understanding of literature and the nation’s place within it.
In this article I explore the way Italian crime fiction is presented to prospective Anglophone readers through paratextual bindings: titles, cover images and blurbs. I focus in particular on the way Italian settings are – variously – described, elucidated, emphasised and promoted, as publishers and their marketing teams seek to place a text within a space of familiarity or exoticism. Through the very act of circulation across cultures and languages, new forms of national allegory are attributed to these crime novels, on the basis of the perceived needs and prior associations of their new readership.
Index / Índice
9 - "Introduction". Carlos Uxó
11- "Leonardo Padura Fuentes (La Habana, 1955): bio-bibliografía".
15- Leonardo Padura Fuentes, "La neblina delayer (FRAGMENTO)".
27 - Carlos Uxó, "Entrevista con Leonardo Padura (Noviembre 2005)".
38- José Antonio Michelena, "Aportes de Leonardo Padura a la literatura policial cubana".
54 - Janet Perez, "Time and Tide, Weather and Decay, Life and Death: Motifs of
Meaning and Memory in Leonardo Padura Fuentes' Havana Detective Tetralogy".
65 - Freddy Vilches, "Descorriendo el velo: apariencia y realidad en Las cuatro
estaciones de Leonardo Padura".
88 - John M. Kirk & Sophie Lavoie, "Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Symbol of the New Cuban Literature: Comments on Pasado perfectd'.
106- Genaro J. Perez, "Motivos repetitivos en Vientos de Cuaresma de Padura Fuentes".
114 - Clemens A. Franken, "La asimilacion del genero policial clasico, negro, antidetectivesco y cubano en la novela Mascaras de Leonardo Padura".
132 - Stephen Wilkinson, "Critiques of sexual and political intolerance in Leonardo Padura's novel Mascaras and the film Fresa y chocolate''.
160 - Carlos Uxó, "La cola de la serpiente de Leonardo Padura: un acercamiento a la comunidad china de La Habana".
171- Juan Armando Epple, "Las tramas de Adiós, Hemingway, de Leonardo Padura".
178 - Ricardo Sumalavia, "Tributos e ironias en el neopolicial latinoamericano en Adiós, Hemingwayde Leonardo Padura".
189 - César Miguel Rondón, "¡Llegó la neblina!".
192 - Amir Valle Ojeda, "La nueva ciudad cubana (y / o La Habana otra) en la novelistica negra de Leonardo Padura".
200 - Lorenzo Lunar, "Paisaje de otoño, fin de un ciclo?".
This contribution describes the evolution of the crime fiction novel into a genre which over the past decades has become characterized by its internationality. This characterisation applies both in terms of its dissemination and in terms of its narrative subject matter. How crime fiction novels convey local, touristic and geographical knowledge throughout the world, modify it, and create topographical fiction, is described. The maps of cities, countries and neighbourhoods that provide a pictorial element to crime fiction novels are symptomatic of the transformation of the genre from a literature of crime into a literature of geographical and cultural orientation. The evolution of the genre makes possible the drafting of a crime fiction world map in order to examine the international range, examples of gaps and significant clusters. A crime fiction atlas can, in addition to this, form a collection of fictitious and narrative descriptions of localities.
The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda. Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria's Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso's positivist Criminal Man. Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualization of Italian crime fiction.
‘The detection of crime is evidently not an art that has been cultivated in England.’ ‘Our Detective Police’, Chambers Journal, 1884. It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise known as the Napoleon of crime, that Poe's Chevalier Dupin invented ratiocination from a comfortable armchair in a darkened room in Paris, or, for that matter, that Sherlock Holmes takes such pains to scoff at the French police, notably a certain detective named Lecoq, who, he claims, 'was a miserable bungler'. French contributions to the development of crime fiction, in particular the detective story, are significant in the sense that one cannot conceive of the developments in nineteenth-century English detective fiction without them. Holmes's arrogance towards the continental police, notably the French, nevertheless bespeaks a certain amount of insecurity with regard to the fearsome reputation of the French police established during Fouchè's reign of terror under Napoleon, a reputation further consolidated throughout the nineteenth century. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
In addition to covering the "detective" fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, this collection of British and American crime fiction considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. Ranging over the last three centuries, it includes chapters on the analysis of crime in eighteenth-century literature; French and Victorian fiction; women and black detectives; crime on film and TV; and police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Until quite recently, the words 'Cambridge Companion' and 'Crime Fiction' would have seemed mutually exclusive. Crime fiction was certainly written about, but on the assumption that readers and author were already dedicated fans, happy to ponder together the exact chronology of Sherlock Holmes's life-story or the mystery of Dr Watson's Christian name. Where the authors claimed some academic credentials, their love for the genre was owned up to as a guilty pleasure - W. H. Auden called it 'an addiction like tobacco or alcohol' - or juxtaposed to the world of 'proper' culture with tongue a fair way into cheek, as in Dorothy L. Sayers's demonstration that when writing the Poetics, what Aristotle desired 'in his heart of hearts… was a good detective story'. Since the 1960s, however, the presumed barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature have been progressively dismantled. If only – at first – as indicators of a great many readers’ needs and anxieties, crime texts were increasingly seen as worthy of close analysis, and by now there are thousands of carefully argued, well-researched, elegantly written studies of the crime genre available and awaiting further comment. Like any new development this emergence has a specific history, any given intersection of which is likely to reveal different terminologies as well as different critical preoccupations. Up to the early 1980s, study of the form was still focused mainly on ‘detective’ or ‘mystery’ fiction, and nodded back to the half-serious ‘rules’ which had been drawn up for the genre in the inter-war period and stressed the figure of the detective and the author’s fair handling of clues. This tradition is well discussed in Stephen Knight’s chapter on ‘the Golden Age’ in the present book. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Popular fiction, with its capacity for diversion, can mask important cultural observations within a framework that is often overlooked in the academic world. Works thought to be merely "escapist" can often be more seriously mined for revelations regarding the worlds they portray, especially those of the disenfranchised. As detective fiction has slowly earned critical respect, more authors from minority groups have chosen it as their medium. Chicana/o authors, previously reluctant to write in an underestimated genre that might further marginalize them, have only entered the world of detective fiction in the past two decades. In this book, the first comprehensive study of Chicano/a detective fiction, Ralph E. Rodriguez examines the recent contributions to the genre by writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos. Their works reveal the struggles of Chicanas/os with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. He maintains that their novels register crucial new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship that cannot be understood apart from the historical instability following the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to that time, when Chicanas/os sought a unified Chicano identity in order to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have seen a disengagement from these nationalist politics and a new trend toward a heterogeneous sense of self. The detective novel and its traditional focus on questions of knowledge and identity turned out to be the perfect medium in which to examine this new self.
"Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre. He evaluates the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American crime literature-characters looking to escape the racial containment of prisons and the ghetto. Gifford also explores the struggles of these black writers in the literary marketplace, from the era of white-owned publishing houses like Holloway House-that fed books and magazines like Players to eager black readers-to the contemporary crop of African American women writers reclaiming the genre as their own.
In Murder on the Reservation, Ray B. Browne surveys the work of several of the best-known writers of crime fiction involving Indian characters and references virtually every book that qualifies as an Indian-related mystery. Browne believes that within the genre of crime fiction all people are equal, and the increasing role of Indian characters in criminal fiction proves what an important role this genre plays as a powerful democratizing force in American society. He endeavors to both analyze and evaluate the individual work of the authors, and at the same time, provide a commentary on the various attitudes towards race relations in the United States that each author presents. Some Indian fiction is intended to right the wrongs the authors feel have been leveled against Indians. Other authors use Indian lore and Indian locales as exotic elements and locations for the entertaining and commercially successful stories they want to write. Browne's analysis includes authors and works of all backgrounds, with mysteries of first-class murder both on and off the reservation.
This paper proposes a new method for the study of world literature. Moretti assumes that within modernity all cultural influences - not necessarily identical with political influences - are part of the struggle for symbolic hegemony. As carriers of modernity literary genres are subjected to various deformations within local cultures.To capture these deformations it is necessary to test selected formal or structural elements (tropes, themes, motife, narrative) across several national literatures.This is not possible through close reading, but only through distant reading, that is to say through interpretations that build on the work of other literary historians. A literary form analysed in this way represents the literary system embodied in the work (a system of literary inequality), and is an abstraction of social relationships. Hence the study of world literature is an analysis of power.
Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.". For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.". Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman's belief in the crucial significance of the translator's work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.
In the first major study of representations of World War II in French crime fiction, Margaret-Anne Hutton draws on a corpus of over 150 texts spanning 60 years. Filling a gap in the fields of both crime fiction and fictional representations of the War, Hutton's book calls into question the way both this popular genre and the French theatre of World War II have been conceptualised and codified.
The publication in 1992 of Miyabe Miyuke's highly anticipated Kasha (translated into English as All She Was Worth) represents a watershed in the history of Japanese women's detective fiction. Inspired by Miyabe's success and the increasing number of Western mysteries in translation, women began writing mysteries of all types, employing the narrative and conceptual resources of the detective genre to depict and critique contemporary Japanese society-and the situation of women in it. Bodies of Evidence examines this recent boom and the ways in which five contemporary authors (Miyabe, Nonami Asa, Shibata Yoshiki, Kirino Natsuo, and Matsuo Yumi) critically engage with a variety of social issues and concerns: consumerism and the crisis of identity, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, sexual harassment and sexual violence, and motherhood. Bodies of Evidence moves beyond the borders of detective fiction scholarship by exploring the worlds constructed by these authors in their novels and showing how they intersect with other political, cultural, and economic discourses and with the lived experiences of contemporary Japanese women.
Within the wide-ranging field of crime fiction, a substantial subgenre containing over 150 transnational crime novels engages with the National Socialist past and its legacy in the postwar era. While a third of these Nazi-themed texts are set during National Socialist rule (1933-45), only a small minority of twelve novels or series feature a "Nazi detective": an investigative figure who works in an official capacity within the structures of the Nazi regime, as part of its police force, army, or paramilitary organizations. To date, there has been little examination of the problems and opportunities this detective figure generates for crime writers or of the wider moral implications of his presence within the crime narrative. This article explores these questions through an examination of the rise of the Nazi detective in 1990s crime fiction and an analysis of his representation as a provider of justice in three crime novels by "second-generation" authors from Britain and Germany: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal (1990), Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht (2002) (To the Victor the Spoils).
All but two of the Nazi detective novels identified during the research for this article were published after 1990. A number of factors, either singly or in combination, may account for the timing of this miniature boom among authors whose national backgrounds are British (three), German (three), Czech (one), Polish (one), Italian American (one) and Canadian (one). The fortieth and fiftieth anniversary commemorations of D-Day, in 1985 and 1995, focused renewed attention on the legacy of the Second World War in former Axis and Allied nations and in those that experienced occupation. Midway between these two points, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War led to a reevaluation of Germany's and Europe's "double past" of fascism and communism and to public discussion of issues such as guilt, victimhood, and memorialization. Debates on such subjects were often extremely lengthy and fraught: for example, the building of a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was first suggested in 1988, formally approved in 1999, and only completed seventeen years later, in 2005.
In addition, the 1980s and 1990s saw an increased focus on the wartime role of the policeman-perpetrator, via a succession of highly publicized war-crimes trials and an emerging strand of perpetrator-centered historiography that received extensive international attention. In 1981, revelations surfaced of Maurice Papon's involvement in deporting Jews while he was a senior police official in Bordeaux; he was finally brought to trial in 1997. Similarly, 1989 saw the arrest of Paul Touvier, a former head of intelligence in the Milice who worked closely with the Gestapo in Vichy France and was tried in 1994. During the 1990s, Anglo-American historians, influenced by the German Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) movement of the 1970s, also began to research the behavior of "ordinary" perpetrators, including policemen. Christopher Browning's study Ordinary Men (1992) scrutinizes the roles of 125 German Ordnungspolizei (regular uniformed police) serving in Reserve Police Battalion 101, a mobile execution squad that killed thirty-eight thousand Jewish civilians in Poland between 1942 and 1943. Daniel J. Goldhagen examines the same case in his controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), which brought discussions about perpetrator motivation into the public realm, particularly in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. While Goldhagen asserts a monocausal theory of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" to explain how the reserve policemen were capable of mass murder, Browning advocates a multicausal explanation of their behavior, which includes additional factors such as peer pressure, deference to authority, and careerism. His stated aim is not to excuse but to understand more fully the complex range of motivating factors that led the men to behave as they did.
The emergence of the Nazi detective in ten crime novels or series since 1990 has seen the Nazi protagonist shift from his customary position of "murderer" (in around 70 percent of the crime novels set during the regime) to that of the "detective" within the genre's murderer-victim-detective triangle. The previously straightforward identification of the Nazi...
Literary-history writing has very often stopped at national or cultural borders: it has been French literary history, or Western, or Arabic, or Chinese literary history. There is nothing wrong with that, but transcending such boundaries is certainly possible and sometimes important.
By “transcultural literary history,” I mean literary history with no predetermined national or temporal limitations.1 This is a vast field, and it allows for investigations of very many kinds. What I wish to emphasize and defend in this essay is, primarily, the very openness of the field. In my view, many different foci, research agendas, and methods are justified in the transcultural study of literary history. We should expect research in the area to pose significant questions and to pursue these in an enlightening manner. That aside, however, we should be wary of all general declarations of what transcultural literary studies “must” be or “cannot” be.
One’s own research interests will largely determine what literary-historical questions one finds significant. I will begin by explaining what aspects of transcultural literary history I myself have been occupied with and why, and then point to a number of other types of transcultural literary studies following entirely different paths. This is the positive part of my essay: an affirmation of the breadth and interest of transcultural literary history.
What I call transcultural literary history has often been referred to in terms of world literature and the study of world literature. There is, however, a tendency, which has been rather pronounced over the last decade, to portray the study of world literature, or what I call the study of transcultural literary history, as something much narrower, in scope or in method, than I have indicated above. The second half of the essay is a reflection on the concept of world literature and, not least, a critical discussion of some recent arguments about it; that is the negative part of the essay and the explanation for its subtitle.
The Swedish academic subject within which I am working, litteraturvetenskap,2 is in principle supposed to comprise both the history and theory of literature in their entirety, but this is not what it is like in practice. There are no separate chairs in Swedish literature in Sweden, so all study of Swedish literature is incorporated into litteraturvetenskap, where it plays a very dominant role. When presenting my academic subject in English-speaking contexts, I call it “Swedish and Comparative Literature.” My real academic specialty, however, is something I call “fundamental literary theory.” For me, the fundamental theoretical questions about literature concern what literature is, how literature functions (linguistically, psychologically, socially), and wherein the value of literature consists.3
I have long found pleasure in reading literature from different ages and cultures, finding it an antidote against cultural claustrophobia, but my research interests in transcultural literary history, if one can call them that, were sparked by a definition of “literature” that I constructed in the late 1980s.4 This was a definition of the term as it is used in the West about modern times—as is well known, the term’s reference is much wider where earlier periods are concerned. Nevertheless, I could not help wondering how the definition would apply to other times and to non-Western cultures, and how the pragmatically distinct use of language to which the definition made reference could be traced in older texts. In pursuing such questions, I gradually arrived at a way of thinking about types of literary culture and about the place of what we call literature in these cultures. Put very briefly, it is this.5
Oral cultures usually display a number of genres that we customarily call literary: songs and narratives of various kinds—entertaining, practical, mythical, magical, or religious, often at one and the same time.6 They do not, however, have a concept of literature.
In literate cultures, genres multiply with time. Religious, administrative, and economic texts of many kinds are created; some of them are viewed by the culture itself as part of its central heritage. Texts that might be characterized as philosophical or historical can be written down, as well as poems and perhaps also songs and...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sussex, 1997.
Scaggs's Crime Fiction Despite their general titles, Plain only examines English-language works, whereas Scaggs's work contains a smattering of references to French works and a discussion of Umberto Eco's Il nome della rossa (publ. as The Name of the Rose
- Sexuality Gender
- The Body
Gender, Sexuality and the Body and John Scaggs's Crime Fiction. Despite their general titles, Plain only
examines English-language works, whereas Scaggs's work contains a smattering of references to French
works and a discussion of Umberto Eco's Il nome della rossa (publ. as The Name of the Rose, 1980).
3. Studies of nonmainstream Anglo-American fiction works include monographs on Jewish (Roth),
- Jean Anderson
- Carolina Miranda
Anderson, Jean, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti, eds. The Foreign in International Crime Fiction:
Transcultural Representations. New York: Continuum, 2012. Print.
Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot
Baker, Peter, and Deborah Shaller, eds. Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a
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Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction
- Patricia P Buckler
Buckler, Patricia P. "Teaching International Detective Fiction." Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of
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Selected and with an Introduction by Michael Wood
- Italo Calvino
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Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment: Bourland's Twenty-First-Century Remake of the Sherlock Holmes Crime Story
- Keren Chiaroni
Chiaroni, Keren. "Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment: Bourland's Twenty-First-Century Remake
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The Post-Colonial Detective
- Ed Christian
Christian, Ed, ed. The Post-Colonial Detective. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001. 1-16. Print.
Killing Carmens: Women's Crime Fiction from Spain. Cardiff: U of Wales P
- Shelley Godsland
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The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present
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French Crime Fiction. Cardiff: U of Wales P
- Claire Gorrara
Gorrara, Claire, ed. French Crime Fiction. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2009. Print.
Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture
- Sari Kawana
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Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction
- Marieke Krajenbrink
- Kate M Quinn
Krajenbrink, Marieke, and Kate M. Quinn, eds. Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print.
Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective
Matzke, Christine, and Suzanne Mühleisen, eds. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Print.
Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture Since
- Anne Mullen
- O ' Emer
- Beirne
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- Sofi Oksanen
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