Detecting Fictions: the Crime Novel in America, Britain and Ireland

(5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The course will chart the development of the dynamic, shifting genre of crime fiction, from its origins in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the key interventions of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, the 'Golden Age' of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley's 'hard boiled' detectives, up to some of the genre's most recent voices: Attica Locke and Tana French. Key topics for anlaysis will include: Genre: the ongoing negotiation and subversion of what could be termed the 'rules' of detective fiction Cultural contexts: variations in the history and development of the crime novel in Britain, America and Ireland The ideological implications of representations of detection and criminality (especially in relation to race, class and gender) The relationship between popular fiction and a literary canon.