Narratology and Detective Criticism
Through a series of close readings, this book offers a fresh perspective on Agatha Christie's mysteries, questioning the conventional resolutions provided by her iconic detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. It invites readers to reconsider the narratives and solutions, encouraging a deeper engagement with the texts and their intricacies.
"The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction and in Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator, editors Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks dive deep into crime literature and culture in an attempt to unravel the mystery of this alluring and enigmatic figure. Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, the book examines characters from the page and screen from Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade -- the image of the hard-boiled loner trawling the mean streets -- to Agatha Christie's Captain Hastings -- the genteel companion in greener surrounds -- as well as other examples from international noir including Giorgio Scerbanenco's Duca Lamberti, Léo Malet's Nestor Burma, and many more. Including case studies, general essays, interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana, and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary and filmic type, Private Investigator seeks to redefine what we think we know about this fascinating protagonist."--Page [4] of cover
Gérard Genette's seminal study of the paratext, Seuils (1987), is the starting point for this collection of essays, all of which seek not only to engage with Genette's taxonomy and apply it, but also to interrogate it and to move through and beyond it. In addition to mapping Genette's organization of (para)textual space onto a number of French texts, including novels and plays, texts translated into French, book series and publishing marketing material, these essays take up some of the challenges raised in Seuils as well as posing their own. For example, the relationship between Genette's work and deconstructionist approaches to text and the intersection of paratextuality and translation, which are hinted at by Genette, are explored in more detail in the volume, as is the notion of moving through and beyond the paratext. As such, this book offers a significant re-engagement with and deployment of paratextual theory and practice.
This book, which was inspired by a conference on plural conjugations of Frenchness (La France au pluriel) held in 2007 at the Universities of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle, focuses on the concept of national belonging as it pertains to detective fiction, with particular emphasis on French and Australian detective fictions and the encounter and crossing over between them. The objective is not only to use the concepts of ‘French’ and ‘Australian’ detective fiction productively, via the analysis of French and Australian detective-fiction novels, but also to challenge and undermine the very notion of national detective fictions, which are so often assumed to be transparently meaningful. The contributors to this volume focus variously on the following areas: comparative analysis of the genesis of French and Australian detective fiction; translation of Australian (and other) novels into French; translation as a genre; Frenchness as a stereotype, its role in individual novels and its spectre in all detective fiction; and readings of individual French and Australian detective novels. Overall, this book aims to challenge assumptions about French detective fiction, its influence on other national fictions and its explicit and implicit presence in all detective fiction.