A Counter-History of Crime Fiction : Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational.

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Revising the Canon of Crime and Detection -- From detective to crime fiction -- Blurring the boundaries -- A glance at the present -- Part I: Supernatural and Gothic -- 2 Detection before Detection -- Dreams and detection -- Ghosts, politics and revenge -- 'Providential fictions' -- Crime literature between tragedy and comedy -- The Newgate Calendars -- Towards the 'professional case' -- The aesthetics of murder -- 3 Persecution and Omniscience -- The enlightened ideal of 'secular omniscience' -- The dark side of omniscience -- Preternatural powers -- Probability vs chance -- Secret societies, the city and the sublime -- 4 Victorian Ghosts and Revengers -- A 'ghost story' of crime and detection -- Dreams, dead witnesses and daring women -- The return of the revenger -- 5 Pseudo-Sciences and the Occult -- Mesmerism, murder and mystery -- Mesmeric villains -- The 'other' Doyle -- Towards psychic detection -- Professionals of the occult -- Fabricated apparitions -- Part II: Sensational -- 6 The Language of Auguste Dupin -- Narrative metamorphoses -- Citizens of Cosmopolis -- An American and Paris -- The strange case of Wilkie Collins and M. Forgues -- M. Gaboriau and the 'unknown public' -- A metropolitan genesis -- 7 On the Sensational in Literature -- Between romance and journalism -- The sensation recipe -- Women as sensation writers and readers -- Sensationalism, degeneration and modernity -- Sensational canons -- A prophecy -- From amateur to professional detective -- Parodies and adaptations -- 8 London as a 'Heart of Darkness' -- Exotic colonies -- The explorer -- The ethnologist -- The missionary -- The city disease -- Before the apocalypse -- 9 The Rhetoric of Atavism and Degeneration -- Lombroso's anarchists and saints -- Between genius and madness.

The shady apostle of degeneration -- Decadent detectives -- Conclusion: the Age of Formula Fiction -- The Sherlock Holmes 'myth' -- Nightmares and orthodoxy -- Britain under threat -- Towards a conservative view of detection -- The role of anthologies -- Detection and modernism -- Reading in the age of Cultural Studies -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.

This book takes a look at the evolution of crime fiction. Considering 'criminography' as a system of inter-related sub-genres, it explores the connections between modes of literature such as revenge tragedies, the gothic and anarchist fiction, while taking into account the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.