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’s aesthetics of hybridity when she introduces dissonance in the genre of detective fiction as she combines it with postmodern aspects without relinquishing her taste for character. Ironically, at the end of Emotionally Weird , her last novel before Case Histories , Atkinson makes a scathing description of a certain type of detective fiction: her heroine has become ‘a writer of detective fiction – the
This first book-length study of Kate Atkinson’s multifaceted œuvre is a comprehensive introductory overview of her novels, play and stories. It situates Atkinson’s literary production in terms of an aesthetics of hydridity that appropriates and re-combines well-known genres (coming-of-age novel, detective fiction, historical novel) and narrative techniques. This book explores the singularity and significance of Atkinson’s complex narratives that engage the reader in contemporary issues and insight into human concerns through a study of the major aspects and themes that tie in her work (the combination of tradition and innovation, the relationship to the collective and personal past, to history and memory, all impregnated with humour and a feminist standpoint). It pursues a broadly chronological line through Atkinson’s literary career from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war. Alongside the well-known novels, the book includes a discussion of her less-studied play and collection of short stories. Chapters combine the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses.
A chess-player is not simply one who plays chess just as a chess piece is not simply a wooden block. Shaped by expectations and imaginations, the figure occupies the centre of a web of a thousand radiations where logic meets dream, and reason meets play. This book aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. It is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster. The history of the cultural chess-player is a spectacle, a collision of tradition and recycling, which rejects the idea of the statuesque chess-player. The book considers three lives of the chess-player. The first as sinner (concerning behavioural and locational contexts), as a melancholic (concerning mind-bending and affective contexts), and as animal (concerning cognitive aspects and the idea of human-ness) from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. The book then considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. IBM's late-twentieth-century supercomputer Deep Blue, Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1769 Automaton Chess-Player and Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat are then examined. The book examines portrayals of the chess-player within comic-books of the mid-twentieth century, considering themes of monstrous bodies, masculinities, and moralities. It focuses on the concepts of the child prodigy, superhero, and transhuman.
The importance of films in the cultural and social life of both Britain and the United States has long been recognized. Although radio survived in Britain more or less intact, by 1960 it too had taken second place to television as the prime domestic medium. This book begins by analysing the very different relationships between cinema and radio that emerged in Britain and the United States. It moves on to examine the ways in which cinema adapted radio programmes in the fields of comedy and detective fiction and then how radio dramatized films. When radio first took off in the United States in the late 1920s, it was regarded by the film industry as a rival, something to keep people at home and away from the cinema. But during the 1930s, Hollywood began to appreciate the value of radio in publicizing and promoting its films. The British broadcasting service was set up in 1922 with a monopoly and finance from a licence fee following negotiations between the Post Office, which controlled the air waves, and the radio industry, which manufactured the equipment. Radio in wartime was informational and inspirational. It provided news, entertainment, and propaganda. The book concludes with a look in detail at the ways in which the two media have dealt with three popular fictional characters, the
Delamotte examines the representation of race in Pauline Hopkins‘s Hagar‘s Daughter (1901/2). She argues that the novel provides a revision of the Female Gothic and also exploits narrative devices familiar from detective fiction. The solving of the ‘mystery’ that lies at the heart of the novel is one which explodes the ideological ‘mystery’, and the national crime of slavery, which separates Black and White, masculine and feminine, home and state, and African American and Euro-American families.
The close relation between concepts of nation and landscapes is well-established in cultural and literary studies. This book considers how the geological substance of national territory itself is used to support ideas of nationhood. The focus of much of the book is on Cornwall (the region located at the far south-west of Britain) and 'primitive' rocks found in this region as an in-depth case study in the context of 'Celtic' Britain. The book begins by focusing primarily on an emerging consciousness of Cornwall as a distinctively rocky territory as depicted in nineteenth-century geological journals, poetry, folklore, travel narratives, gothic and detective fiction. It then looks mainly at twentieth-century ghost stories, Cornish nationalist and New Age writing, and modernist and romance novels. The book reflects how the categories of science and literature were only beginning to take shape in the nineteenth century. It does so by building on well-established connections between these fields to show how geology and poetry together engage with rocks as a basis for perceiving Celtic nations and native races as distinct from England. Finally, the book takes on a more distinctly fictional engagement with the Cornish nationalist imagination and its ghosts.
of the eye in ‘The tell-tale heart’; and the bodily tattooing in Moby-Dick . Foreshadowing this chapter’s discussion of the beating heart in Poe’s short story, Schiffmacher states that ‘tattoos function as a means of non-verbal communication’ and gives the example of ‘the lines on the face of the Inuit telling the tale of a murder’ (Schiffmacher 2005 : 12). This essence of creating rationalised patterns of meaning out of chaos remains central to nineteenth-century detective fiction. As Thomas notes, ‘the literary detective transcribes the criminal body and
This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate ‘pathways’, developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the ‘pathways’ observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction.
), reference to alchemy and the philosopher’s stone, and possible diabolic influence are bandied about in a story seen (in contrast with the epistemological optimism of most detective fiction – an ethical pessimism notwithstanding) as ‘doubly negative in its conclusions’ and imbued with an ‘ultimate pessimism’ (xv, xviii). Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, the aristocratic private sleuth and master of deduction or, as he himself stresses, of ‘analysis’ in Poe’s trio of pioneering detective tales, is ever keen to expatiate on his methods to (or through
fiction paper, the Strand enjoyed a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with detective fiction, which ‘far outweighed any other genre in the magazine’, and Sherlock Holmes’ serial adventures had appeared in it since 1891.3 Lee’s association with the monthly is therefore significant not only because it establishes her place within the detective canon but also because it points to changing generic boundaries and readerly values in the early years of the twentieth century. 63 Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime As Nick Freeman’s chapter in this volume also notes, Marsh