scholarly journals "Inherent Vice": Thomas Pynchon beyond the Postmodern Fiction and Anti-Detective Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-294
Author(s):  
Antonio Di Vilio
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Crying Of Lot 49

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pynchon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition – to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong– playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel. 

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 The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Rhys William Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Wild Sheep ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Definition Of

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
John S. Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Normal Function ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Brothers Karamazov

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

scholarly journals Reviews: Social History, Local History and Historiography, Receptions and Revisitings: Review Articles, 1978–2011, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race and Nation, the Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James, the Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, the Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, the Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, the Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism, a Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940, American Postmodern Fiction and the Past, the Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-111
Author(s):  
Olwen Hufton ◽  
Ed Rugemer ◽  
Clare Elliott ◽  
Simon James ◽  
Heather Worthington ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Social History ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
The Impact

scholarly journals The Comfort of Crime: The Appeal of Formulaic Fiction during the Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (39) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Agatha Christie

2020 was taxing, and one of the comforting ways of dealing with the uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic has brought was reading. It seems hardly surprising that the British turned to crime fiction, which they not only avidly consume but also successfully produce. Moreover, 2020 marked the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a novel that introduced Agatha Christie and her first detective, Hercule Poirot. The anniversary partly accounts for the resurgence of interest in classic detective fiction. Over the last one hundred years the genre has undergone various developments and diversifications, but this article offers a look back at its past. Acknowledging Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King’s objections to defining crime fiction as formulaic (2020), it draws on John G. Cawelti’s classic work on the mystery and detective story formulas (1976) to addresses the popularity of crime fiction during the pandemic. It contends that while the immense appeal of the crime genre stems from its adaptability, it is the oft-criticised basic mystery formula that offers the greatest comfort during such challenging times.

scholarly journals Ruritania by the Sea

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitta Hudácskó
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Story Writer

Seaside resorts frequently served as locations of murder mysteries in Golden Age detection fiction, since these destinations could provide a diverse clientele, confined to manageably small groups essential to classic detective stories. The fictional seaside town of Wilvercombe serves as the location of Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Have His Carcase (1932), in which Lord Peter Wimsey and detective-story writer Harriet Vane investigate the case of a man found dead on the beach. The location of the body turns out to be a source of confusion: while the detectives expect a traditional locked-room mystery to unfold (albeit in an open-air setting), the death cannot be resolved until the detectives realize that they are working in the wrong genre: instead of a clue-puzzle mystery, they are trapped in a Ruritanian romance, with outlandish tales of intrigue, unlikely members of the Russian aristocracy, and exaggerated and oppressive performances of heterosexual romance. (BH)

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