scholarly journals Crime and Violence in the Fiction of Caterina Albert / Víctor Català Connections with the Crime Novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lluïsa Julià Capdevila
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Crime Novel

After classifying the fictional genres that are to be found in the seven volumes of short stories by Caterina Albert / Víctor Català that were published between 1902 and 1951, this article studies the ways in which the corrosive sense and presence of violence and crime are used against the patriarchal system in her work. The new line of research presented here, comparing Víctor Català’s short stories with crime fiction, is still in its early stages. The analysis of some specific stories also considers the technical evolution and introduction of cinematographic forms. Finally, it is noted how Víctor Català is a precursor of women writers of today’s increasingly popular crime fiction.

Per una metodologia del protogiallo italiano: Problemi e proposte

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 511-531
Author(s):  
Francesca Facchi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Famous Trials ◽  
Methodological Difficulties

In the first systematic study about the Italian detective novel (1979), Loris Rambelli dates the beginnings of the genre to 1929, the publication year of the first of publisher Mondadori's ‘Yellow Books’ (Libri Gialli), the series of yellow-covered books which made the ‘giallo’ synonymous with a crime novel. Nonetheless, texts dealing with mysteries, criminals, police, trials and detection enthralled Italian readers from the 1850s on, complying with the modern dynamics of mass phenomena, contributing to the modern conception of the genre, and playing a crucial role in the culture and society of a recently unified Italy. Not conforming to a recognizable genre-structure, the pre-1929 period has been defined the “prehistory of Italian crime fiction” or protogiallo and has become a topic of academic interest only in recent years. The newness of the scholarship explains the methodological difficulties researchers have to face, such as the classification problem – it is very complex to establish common critical criteria for analyzing diverse materials such as feuilletons, novels, short stories and famous trials journals – and the objective delay in the development of the genre in Italy, especially compared to the British, American and French cases. Building on the recent line of investigation, this paper examines such critical issues in order to identify a methodological approach and a theoretical framework useful to study the prehistory of Italian crime fiction.

Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai's Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Rebecca Fasselt
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Women Detectives ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Lazarus Effect

Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others.

scholarly journals Bloody Women: How Female Authors Have Transformed the Scottish Contemporary Crime Fiction Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Lorna Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Abstract This study will explore the role of female authors in contemporary Scottish crime fiction. Over the past thirty years, women writers have overhauled the traditionally male dominated genre of crime fiction by writing about strong female characters who drive the plot and solve the crimes. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Lin Anderson are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender and genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, both journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series, I wish to explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives. This essay documents the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research which involves writing a crime novel set in a post referendum Scotland. I examine a progressive and contemporary Scottish society, where women hold many senior positions in public life, and investigate whether this has an effect on the outcome of crimes. Through this narrative, my main character will focus on the current and largely hidden crimes of human trafficking and domestic abuse. By doing this I examine the ways in which the modern crime novel has evolved to cross genre boundaries. In addition to focusing on a crime, the victims and witnesses, today’s crime novels are tackling social issues to reflect society’s changing attitudes and values.

Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338
Author(s):  
Daniel Del Gobbo
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
High Court ◽  
Law System ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Essential Quality ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Common ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Unreliable Narration

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

scholarly journals Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women

1970 ◽  
pp. 100-101
Author(s):  
Tania Tabbara
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
Palestinian Women ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Female Writers

I’ve always had mixed feelings concerning anthologies on women writers. It seems to me that classifying writers by their nationality and their gender does not really do justice to the creative originality of their stories. By classifying them in that way the stories are somehow assumed to reflect a certain social and political reality, which might not at all be intended by the writers.Especially regarding female writers from the Middle East, one expects to find stories that reflect upon the suppression of women in a patriarchal society that is determined by Islamic culture. Palestinian women writers have to fight this cliché as much as the expectation that their writing is (merely) informed by their status as refugees or occupied people (which of course might be the case but not necessarily so, or maybe only partially so).

Rainy Days / Días de lluvia: Short Stories by Contemporary Spanish Women Writers

1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 589
Author(s):  
Kay Pritchett ◽  
Montserrat Lunati ◽  
Marilyn Myerscough
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Spanish Women Writers ◽  
Spanish Women ◽  
Rainy Days

scholarly journals A CONDIÇÃO FEMININA EM MORNAS ERAM AS NOITES, DE DINA SALÚSTIO

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Demétrio Alves Paz ◽  
Mithiele Da Silva Scarton
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
First Person ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Broad View

O presente trabalho, relacionado ao estudo desenvolvido pelo projeto de pesquisa intitulado Mulheres fortes: O conto africano de língua portuguesa de autoria feminina (PROBIC/FAPERGS), tem por objetivo analisar a condição feminina presente em nove contos da obra Mornas eram as noites, de autoria da escritora cabo-verdiana Dina Salústio. A partir da leitura de obras críticas de especialistas nas literaturas africanas de língua portuguesa, como Maria Aparecida Santilli (2007), Manuel Ferreira (1987), Pires Laranjeira (1995) e Simone Caputo Gomes (2006; 2013), assim como em artigos publicados em revistas acadêmicas, revisamos a fortuna crítica da autora com o intuito de conhecer seus temas. Nas nove narrativas, observamos que há figuras femininas diferenciadas, representando um amplo apanhado de todas as classes sociais e de diferentes idades. A grande maioria das histórias é narrada em primeira pessoa, o que aproxima o leitor da condição feminina e também funciona como uma espécie de pedido de cumplicidade por parte das narradoras para sentir-se parte desse emaranhado de sentimentos e situações em que elas se encontram.Palavras-chave: Literatura de autoria feminina. Conto. Literatura cabo-verdiana. Dina Salústio. Condição feminina.ABSTRACTThis article, related to the study developed in the research project Strong Women: African short stories written by women writers (PROBIC/FAPERGS), aims to to analyze the women’s condition in 9 (nine) short stories in Warm were the nights, by the Cape Verdean writer Dina Salústio. From the reading of critical works by scholars of African Literature in Portuguese Language such as Maria Aparecida Santilli (2007), Manuel Ferreira (1987), Pires Laranjeira (1995) e Simone Caputo Gomes (2006, 2013), as well as articles in academic journals, we revised the critical works about the author to get a better knowledge of her themes. In the nine narratives, we noted that there are differentiated feminine figures, representing a broad view of all social classes and different ages. The majority of stories were narrated in the first person, which connect the reader to the women’s condition as well as it works as a kind of asking for partnership by the narrators to feel part of this connection of feelings and situations in which the characters are involved. Keywords: Women’s writing. Short story. Cape Verdean Literature. Dina Salústio. Women’s condition.

scholarly journals In conversation with Catherine Cole

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaydeep Sarangi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Sea Birds ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dry Dock

Catherine Cole is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. In March 2017, she will take up the position of Professor in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK. Catherine has published three novels, Dry Dock (1999) and Skin Deep (2002) and The Grave at Thu Le (2006), two non-fiction books, Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction (1996) and The Poet Who Forgot (2008). She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam (2010) and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009). Her poetry, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and internationally and produced by BBC Radio 4. In 2017 Catherine’s short story collection, Sea Birds Crying in the Harbour Dark, will be published by UWA Press.

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