Crime narratives and global politics

Bibliographic Data

ID9002965
AuthorsLucy Evans (0009-0006-1929-3896, University of Leicester, corresponding author), Mandala White (University of Leeds)
Year2012
Volume47
Issue2
Pages139-143
Publication date2012-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0021989412447487
OpenAlexW1974572042
LanguageEN
References cited10

In a study offering postcolonial perspectives on crime fiction, Christine Matzke and Susan Muhleisen observe that the “boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles”. The growing diversity within crime fiction, they suggest, has created a need for new critical paradigms (2006: 2). This symposium has two related aims: first, it examines the changing formal characteristics of crime narratives, and second, and more importantly, it considers how, in an age in which crime takes the form of terrorism, industrial disaster, state violence, corporate corruption, drug wars, and cyber scams, conceptions of crime and criminality are being challenged and reconfigured within these narratives. A key concern of the symposium is the shift from a mode of writing that endorses the colonial project to one that reflects critically upon its legacies. In this respect, it extends Matzke’s and Muhleisen’s comparison of crime fiction in the colonial era, which often served to reaffirm imperial power, to a postcolonial mode of crime writing that questions the social order, launching an investigation of “power and authority” (2006: 4–5). This transferral of focus from the individual to the social system as the subject of investigation is not a new phenomenon in crime writing. In his account of the evolution of detective fiction, Martin Priestman refers to two “national” traditions: the English detective story, beginning with Wilkie Collins in the 1860s and continuing into the interwar “Golden Age” dominated by Agatha Christie, and the US hardboiled private-eye style of detective fiction initiated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which Priestman suggests evolved in “conscious opposition” to the English model of the detective novel (2003: 2). The clear-cut rationality of the detective figure who upholds law and order in the “clue-puzzle” English tradition can be compared to the confusion and angst of the private eye negotiating a corrupt and morally questionable society whose institutions cannot be trusted. As Andrew Pepper explains, “one of the distinctive features of the hardboiled crime novel has traditionally been the problematic nature of notions like ‘law’ and ‘justice’” (2003: 212). 447487 JCL47210.1177/0021989412447487Evans and WhiteThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012

Agatha · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Criminology · Detective fiction · Language change · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Terrorism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law

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