Cross-Cultural Crime Fiction

Across_Cultures_thumbIncreasing numbers of contemporary books, articles and conference papers have been devoted to analysing crime and detective fiction within a wide variety of cross-cultural contexts.  Critics focus on the diversity of the genre and on the manifold ways in which generic tropes are being transformed as they take on different cultural and national identities.  Studies such as these shed light on one of the main reasons for the genre’s durability: as Kate Horsley writes in “Contemporary African Crime Fiction”, “Detective fiction has remained a resilient and versatile genre because of its capacity to raise difficult questions about corruption and moral failure.  It represents the investigation of individual crimes but can also work to expose the failures, traumas and brutalities of political and social life.”

This Autumn Crimeculture is featuring some of the best of the 2012-13 publications on cross-culture crime and detective fiction. The following books and articles are reviewed and highly recommended:

“Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (Volume 13 Number 1, 2013)

Peter Baker (ed), Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot, Continuum, June 2012

Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti and Jean Anderson (eds), The Foreign in International Crime Writing: Transcultural Representations, Continuum, June 2012

Berit Åström, Katarina Gregersdotter and Tanya Horeck (eds), Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, October 2012

Boris Dralyuk, Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934, Brill: Leiden and Boston, October 2012

Lucy Andrew & Catherine Phelps  (eds), Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crime (European Crime Fictions), University of Wales Press, April 2013

John Cullen Gruesser, Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, forthcoming Fall/Winter 2013

 

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