Crime Fiction As World Literature

by Nilsson, Louise; Damrosch, David; D'haen, Theo

• ISBN13: 9781501319327
• ISBN10: 1501319329
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-02-23
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

While crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres, this is the first book to treat it in its full global is the first book to treat crime fiction in its full global and plurilingual dimensions, taking the genre seriously as a participant in the international sphere of world literature. In a wide-ranging panorama of the genre, twenty critics discuss crime fiction from Bulgaria, China, Israel, Mexico, Scandinavia, Kenya, Catalonia, and Tibet, among other locales. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature, Crime Fiction as World Literature gives new insights not only into the genre itself but also into the transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape of contemporary popular culture.

Author Biography

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, USA, where he is also Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Professor Damrosch is one of the world's foremost authorities on World Literature, past President of the American Comparative Literature Association, and author or editor of 17 books, including the ground-breaking What Is World Literature? (2003; translated into seven languages). Among his other publications are How to Read World Literature (2009), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh ( 2007), and World Literature in Theory (edited; 2014).

Theo D'haen is Professor of English and American Literatures at K.U. Leuven, Belgium. He is the author or editor of 53 books, including American Literature: A History (2014), The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012), World Literature: A Reader (edited with César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl, 2013), A World History of Literature (2012), and The Routledge Companion to World Literature (edited with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, 2012).

Louise Nilsson is Teaching Assistant & Researcher in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Crime Fiction as World Literature
Louise Nilsson (Uppsala University, Sweden), Theo D'haen (K.U. Leuven, Belgium), David Damrosch (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)

I. Global and Local

1. World Literature Par Excellence: Crime Fiction as Vehicle for Local Phenomena
Andreas Hedberg (Uppsala University, Sweden)

2. One-way Traffic: The Politics of Knowledge in the Narconovelas of Elmer Mendoza
Michael Wood (Princeton University, USA)

3. Red Herrings and Read Alerts: Crime and Trans-Cultural Clues in Almost Blue and Nairobi Heat
Minu Tharoor (New York University, United States of America)

4. The Detective Is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State
Bruce Robbins (Columbia University, United States of America)

5. Four Generations, One Crime
Michaela Bronstein (Harvard University, United States of America)

II. Market Mechanisms

6. With a Global Market in Mind: Agents, Authors and the Dissemination of Contemporary Swedish Crime Fiction
Karl Berglund (Uppsala University, Sweden)

7. How to Murder Somebody without Being Caught as a Bad Writer: Handbooks on Writing Detective Fiction
Dirk de Geest and Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)

8. Covering Crime Fiction: Turning National Literatures to World Literature through Marketing Strategies
Louise Nilsson (Uppsala University, Sweden)

9. Surrealist Noir: Aragon's Le Cahier Noir and Pamuk's The Black Book
Delia Ungureanu (Harvard University, United States of America, and University of Bucharest, Romania)

III. Translating Crime

10. Translating Crime in Europe
Susan Bassnett (University of Warwick, United Kingdom)

11. Making It Ours: Translation, Domestication, and Catalan Crime Fiction
Stewart King (Monash University, Australia)

12. In the Footsteps of Agatha Christie: Contemporary Bulgarian Crime Fiction
Mihaela Harper (Bilkent University, Turkey)

13. A Missing Literature: Dror Mishani's A Missing File and the Case of Israeli Crime Fiction
Maayan Eitan (University of Michigan, United States of America)

14. World Form and Contemporary Thai Crime Fiction
Suradech Chotiudompant (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)

V. Holmes away from Home

15. Holmes Away from Home: The Great Detective Character in the Transnational Literary Network
Michael Harris-Peyton (University of Delaware, United States of America)

16. Sherlock's Queen Bee
Theo D'haen (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)

17. Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin in Republican China
Wei Yan (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)

18. A Sinister Chuckle: Sherlock in Tibet
David Damrosch (Harvard University, United States of America)

19. Detecting Conspiracy: Boris Akunin's Dandiacal Detective, or a Century in Queer Profiles from London to Moscow
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (University of Texas at Austin, United States of America)

Index