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French crime fiction and the Second World War explores France's preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of crime fiction, one of popular culture's most enduring literary forms. The study analyses representations of the war years in a selection of French crime novels from the late 1940s to the 2000s. All the crime novels discussed grapple with the challenges of what it means for generations past and present to live in the shadow of the war: from memories of French resistance and collaboration to Jewish persecution and the legacies of the concentration camps. The book argues that crime fiction offers novel ways for charting the two-way traffic between official discourses and popular reconstructions of such a contested conflict in French cultural memory.
Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films into English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the rich history of Nordic noir, examines the appeal of this particular genre, and attempt to reveal why it is distinct from the plethora of other crime fictions.
3970 Postcolonial Manchester:Layout 1 28/6/13 12:37 Page 110 3 Manchester’s crime fiction: the mystery of the city’s smoking gun Lynne Pearce Greater Manchester is frequently written and spoken about as one of the UK’s top crime hotspots; and many of its districts (Hulme, Moss Side, Wythenshawe, Longsight, Whalley Range) rank high in those league tables used to provide a snapshot of the nation’s most socially and economically deprived areas (Taylor, Evans and Fraser, 1996: 275–9; ).1 It should therefore be no surprize that the fiction genre that has become
This article considers the exploration of Gothic genericity within two of Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s neglected penny blood fictions. It observes the way in which genericity comes to be associated with the Gothic as the supposedly disruptive influence of popular literatures is countered by Victorian reviewers. These emphasise such texts’ genericity in order to contain their influence and separate them from superior readerships and literature which is held to transcend generic limitations. Braddon‘s bloods explore this implicit association between the Gothic and genericity and suggest that the latter – identified in terms of the Gothic‘s status as an ephemeral commodity in the penny blood genre – actually enhances rather than limits, the Gothic‘s agency.
Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions include both the enduringly canonical and the less studied, and the geographical compass of the work embraces not merely British, European and American authors but also the highly pertinent issue of self-destruction in modern Japanese culture. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy’s Reliques and Patricia Highsmith’s crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis – a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications – in fiction and culture. Suicide and the Gothic will prove a central – and provocative – resource for those engaged in the study of the genre from the eighteenth century onwards, but will also support scholars working in complementary literary fields from Romanticism to crime fiction and theoretical disciplines from the medical humanities to Queer Studies, as well as the broader fields of American and European studies. Its contents are as relevant to the undergraduate reader as they are to the advanced postgraduate and the faculty member: suicide is a crucial subject in culture as well as criticism.
This book is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates Julian Barnes's work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy. It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but along the way also shows how certain key thematic preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory). Chapters provide detailed reading of each major publication in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes's fiction, including art, authorship, history, love, and religion. Alongside the ‘canonical’ Barnes texts, the book includes discussion of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of fictions of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George also benefits from archival research into his unpublished materials.
This article analyses the representation of several colonial structures in the Caribbean reconfiguration of the Gothic genre, specifically in two works of contemporary Puerto Ricanfiction: Miss Florences Trunk: Fragments for a Romantic Trash Novel (1991) by Ana Lydia Vega and Over My Dead Body (2012) by Marta Aponte Alsina. In these novellas, specifically through the main characters reading of diaries and confessions, we are presented with a description of the physical structures. At the same time, the colonial structure also emerges, a context in which slavery, sexual abuse and mulataje are described as ubiquitous sources of terror.
rethinking memory as acts of remembrance defined by social frameworks anchored in the nation-state. He proposes instead a fluid model of memory networks that allow multiple and multi-layered points of contact between past events to resurface. As Rothberg asserts, ‘memory emerges from unexpected, multidirectional encounters – encounters between diverse pasts and a conflictual present, to be sure, but also between different agents or catalysts of memory’.2 In this book, memories of the Second World War have been examined via encounters with crime fiction, a
• 5 • Mobilising memory: reading the Second World War in children’s crime fiction of the 1990s and 2000s The 1990s and 2000s in France saw a number of memorial taboos surrounding the Second World War publicly overturned. The most symbolic of these acts occurred during the speech delivered by newly elected President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995 to mark the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver. For the first time in national history, a French head of state officially acknowledged the active support of the Vichy regime and its agents
• 3 • Resurgent collaboration: revisiting collaboration in French crime fiction of the 1980s French collaboration with the occupier was one of a number of war stories that resurfaced sporadically in the immediate post-war decades in the form of high-profile political and legal affairs.1 Such public airings served to remind people of the reverberations of wartime choices, although collaboration was ever the the shadowy other of dominant resistance narratives shadowy other of dominant resistance narratives of national heroism. Even into the 1970s and early