Sensational Fictions: British and American Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Sensational Fictions investigates the development of crime fiction in England and the US from the Victorian era through the twentieth century. We will begin with the genre’s origins in Victorian sensation fiction and the explosive popularity of Sherlock Holmes, moving on to the Golden Age of the clue-puzzle mystery in 1920s England, the emergence of the hardboiled detective novel in 1930s America, and the postwar rise of the police procedural. We will look at all of this fiction in its historical contexts—the expansion of the British Empire, the First World War, Prohibition, and the Great Depression—as well as its cultural contexts (including Victorian pseudoscience, modern advertising, the emergence of psychology, and others). Authors will include but are not necessarily limited to: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and P.D. James.