scholarly journals The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Péter Hajdu
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Love Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Exclusive Focus

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

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 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.

scholarly journals The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Alison Moulds
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Healthy Woman ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Woman Doctor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Detective ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Woman Movement

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

Detective Fiction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Humpherys
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moonstone

Much of 19th-century detective fiction was published in periodicals, the form of Victorian detective fiction being primarily the short story, though there were a handful of novels and novellas. The genre of detective fiction novels as it came down into the early 20th century was essentially established in the previous century. The standard history of Victorian detective fiction (in which a detective works to solve a specific crime or mystery) starts with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin stories (1841–1846), followed by the detectives of Charles Dickens (Bucket in Bleak House [1852–1853]) and Wilkie Collins (Cuff in The Moonstone [1868]) and culminating in the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. These texts and writers were for the most part the only ones subjected to early critical study. Sometimes early histories of detective ficton would briefly mention other English precursors to Sherlock Holmes, including William Godwin, Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams (1794) and the Newgate Calendar (1774); Thomas Gaspey, Richmond: Scenes from the Life of a Bow Street Runner (1827); or William Russell, Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer, by “Waters” (1856). Since the 1990s, however, following on the increased interest in popular culture and the recovery of texts by women writers, as well as the theoretical turn, especially structuralism, attention has increased in other writers of detective fiction, either earlier or contemporary with the Sherlock Holmes stories though many critical works still treat only the Sherlock Holmes. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the canon of detective fiction has expanded, criticism has done so as well by focusing on 19th-century detective fiction in terms of genre, science, and the empire.

scholarly journals Names and Identities in the Italian Detective Story

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Giovanna Arcamone
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Carlo Emilio Gadda ◽  
French And English ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Over Time

Detective stories were established in Italy at the end of the nine- teenth century in imitation of the 'noir' and the French and English serial novels. The Italian detective story over time has grown also with some of our better writers and it is to stories written by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Fruttero/Franco Lucentini, Carlo Fruttero and Andrea Vitali that this paper is dedicated to investigating. In addition, all these authors reveal with linguistic reflections that they appreciate the inherent power of Proper Names. The de- tective novel is especially appropriate on the relation between proper names and identity. Indeed, normally at the beginning of events both in the real world and in detective fiction the personalities present in the good and bad texture of events have not yet been identified. These authors of Italian detective stories look for an ally in the nominatio to help them define the identity of their characters and the backdrop of their story.

scholarly journals Edgar Allan Poe: A Source for Miriam Allen Deford

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Maria Alice Ribeiro Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Family ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Point Of Departure

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on North American culture and literature is still a subject of debate in contemporary literary theory. However, Poe’s creative legacy regarding the writings of Miriam Allen Deford remains neglected by the literary critics. Deford’s fiction explored a set of literary genres, such as biography, science fiction, crime and detective short stories. Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article aims to identify similarities between “A Death in the Family” and some of Poe’s works. Drawing on studies by J. T. Irwin, James M. Hutchisson and others, the objective of this paper is to analyze passages from Deford’s tale in comparison with the poetry and fictional prose of Poe. The analysis suggests that Deford’s horror short story “A Death in the Family,” published in 1961, was mostly inspired by Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, and poems.

Weird History / Weird Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Chloé Germaine Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
Epistemological Uncertainty

The 2003 horror short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street partakes of the Weird tradition of revising the history of human civilisation whilst also producing a secret history of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The stories pit Conan Doyle’s master of rational enquiry against Lovecraft’s terrifying monsters. The contest is unsettling. Typically, detective fiction shores up faith in rational enquiry, whilst the Weird disrupts enlightenment narratives, suggesting that everything we know about the world is wrong. Shadows over Baker Street encourages the reader to surrender disbelief entirely in the face of the ‘ineluctability of the Weird.’ This surrender manifests a postmillennial structure of feeling towards epistemological uncertainty. Shadows over Baker Street is an example of how the Weird challenges rational, inductive reasoning and epistemological certainty, ushering in an era of belief - in the unbelievable.

Tracking Daniel's Steps

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-295
Author(s):  
Margarita Rigal-Aragón
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Teaching Learning ◽  
The Impact

This chapter shows the results of a teaching-learning experience carried out for over 15 academic years. Since it is usually agreed that Edgar Allan Poe is the father of detective fiction, students are embarked in a deductive process to explore some key antecedents to “The Murders of the Rue Morgue.” This starts with the analysis of a few lines of Daniel's Book, Aesop's “The Fox and the Old Lion,” and some sections of Oedipus Rex. Afterwards the students enter the modern world, examining Hamlet, learning about Voltarie's Zadig, Vidocq, and The Newgate Calendar. Thenceforth, the impact of “Murders” among the 1840s public, together with its two sequels (“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter”) is investigated, completing the Dupin Trilogy and assisting to the birth of “serialized” ratiocination narratives. Finally, students study “Thou Art the Man,” a non-Dupin detective story in which country manners are called into question.

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.

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