Shovels Out

Mnemosyne ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-701
Author(s):  
Nandini Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Detective Story ◽  
Palatine Hill

Abstract Review of: T.P. Wiseman, The House of Augustus: A Historical Detective Story. This engaging and accessible book conclusively puts to rest the longstanding misidentification of grand ruins on Rome’s Palatine Hill as the ‘House of Augustus’. Wiseman defends the view that Augustus’ buildings on the Palatine carefully differentiated between private modesty and public munificence while aligning the princeps with Romulus through their various imprints on this storied landscape. Sound archaeological arguments are couched within a less convincing attempt to reframe Augustus as a populist hero.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

scholarly journals Genre, Computation, and the Varieties of Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wilkens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Textual Content

Is "literary fiction" a useful genre label in the post-World War II United States? In some sense, the answer is obviously yes; there are sections marked "literary fiction" on Amazon, in bookstores, and on Goodreads, all of which contain many postwar and contemporary titles. Much of what is taught in contemporary fiction classes also falls under the heading of literary fiction, even if that label isn't always used explicitly. On the other hand, literary fiction, if it hangs together at all, may be defined as much by its (or its consumers') resistance to genre as by its positive textual content. That is, where conventional genres like the detective story or the erotic romance are recognizable by the presence of certain character types, plot events, and narrative styles, it is difficult to find any broadly agreeable set of such features by which literary fiction might be consistently identified.

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