Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

by Frank, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780230230309
• ISBN10: 023023030X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In this innovative book, now available in paperback for the first time, Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and Darwin's theories of evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle.

Author Biography

LAWRENCE FRANK is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self and of essays on nineteenth-century British and American literature and culture that have appeared in various collections and journals, including American Imago, the Dickens Studies Annual, Essays in Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Signs.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements * Introduction: Contexts * PART I: EDGAR ALLAN POE * 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue': Edgar Allan Poe's Evolutionary Reverie * 'The Gold-Bug', Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination * PART II: CHARLES DICKENS * Bleak House, the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative * News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection and The Mystery of Edwin Drood * PART III: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE * Sherlock Holmes and 'The Book of Life' *
Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin and Doyle * The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind * Epilogue: 'A Retrospection' * Notes * Index

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