Detecting Detection International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot

by Baker, Peter; Shaller, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9781441100788
• ISBN10: 1441100784
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-06-14
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

We indulge our fascination with detection in many ways, only some of which occur in the detective story. In fact, modern fiction regularly uses elements of a detective narrative to tell another story altogether, to engage characters, narrators, and readers with questions of identity, with examinations of moral and ethical reasoning, with critiques of social and political injustices, and with the metaphysics of meaning itself. Detective plots cross cultural and national boundaries and occur in different ways and different genres. Taken together, they suggest important contemporary understandings of who and what we are, how and what we aspire to become. Detecting Detection gathers writing from the UK, North and South America, Europe, and Asia to draw together instances of the detective plot in contemporary fiction. It is unique not only in addressing the themea recurring one in modern literaturebut in tracking the interest in detectives and detection across international borders. >

Table of Contents

ContributorsEditors' Introduction1. The Detection Plot as a Means of Testimony in Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow FliesHeta Pyrhönen2. Is The Savage Detectives A Detective Story?Peter Baker3. Detectivism as a Means of Resistance in Juan Marse's El embrujo de ShanghaiAnna-Maria Medina4. Two Men Walk into a BarMichelle Robinson5. Espionage and the War on Secrecy and Terror in Graham Greene and BeyondSofia Ahlberg6. The Stories We All Tell: The Function of Language and Knowledge in Julia Kristeva's Novel Possessions Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis7. Zen Keytsch: Mystery Handymen with Dragon TattoosSheng-Mai Ma8. Knowing the Unknowable: Detecting Metaphysics and Religion in Crime FictionKim Toft Hansen9. African Initiation Narratives and the Modern Detective NovelAmadou Koné