Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Detective stories and novels draw the attention of a wide array of readers. These were mouth- watering prospects whenever being catered to its readers and audiences over the decades. However, if we could go back through the time machine, we would see that late 18th and later half of 19th century developed the foundation of such kind of fictions and not to mention, afterward, detective fictions progressed leaps and bounds, as it rampaged its authority on the English literature. Although such stories are considered as potential crowd pullers but above all, if we intricate such stories and novels in depth, we would be able to see a sizeable reflection of 19th century Victorian Age and its social perspectives. Therefore, in this essay, we would like to emphasize primarily to illustrate the socio-economy of Victorian Era, in relevance to the contribution of detective fiction stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In the present scenario where, English Literature stands as a pivotal area of research and development, offbeat genres have taken a step ahead as areas of interest among scholars. Detective fiction which came into the literary scene in the second half of the Victorian Age, found its first prominent clues in the novels of Wilkie Collins. Though the chronology of detective fiction is short, it bloomed in the early years of the twentieth century through the works of great writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; who gave the world the most fascinating fictional detective figure i.e. Sherlock Holmes. The expanse of the genre, then, became inclusive of scientific understanding and techniques. As interdisciplinarity swept in detective fiction, kaleidoscopic views and analysis were generated regarding the works of detection. The genre became more prominent with writers like Agatha Christie and later J.K Rowling, Joe Pickett, etc. Detective fiction continues to flourish as a genre in the twentieth first century and is also welcomed in the form of adaptations on the digital screen and television. The paper aims to highlight the origin of Detective fiction and the journey of its development to one of the most eminent genres in the present time. The paper briefly throws light on oeuvre of Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who were the pioneers in the progress of the genre. The paper seeks to establish the significance and relevance of detective fiction and the various factors that led to its rise in the field of English Literature.According to Charles J. Rzepka: A Mystery detective story usually contains a detective of some kind, an unsolved mystery (not always technically crime), and an investigation by which the mystery is eventually solved, there is another component, however, that may be present in varying degrees, or may not be present at all. This is the so-called ‗puzzle element': the presentation of the mystery as an ongoing problem for the reader to solve, and its power to engage the reader's own reasoning abilities. The first elements of detective fiction-detective, mystery, investigation-make a conjoint appearance quite early in the history of the genre. However, the fourth, the ‗puzzle element', is conspicuous by its absence during most of this period. (Rzepka,p. 10) In his book Detective Fiction : Cultural history of Literature, Charles J. Rzepka defines four major components which contribute in building up a detective story-the first being the self-proclaimed detective who carries out the investigation throughout the plot; the second constituent i.e. an ‗unsolved mystery' or a baffling problem which governs the storyline and the behaviors of the characters. This problem should not necessarily be a crime. Lastly, an investigation should take place with the motive to solve the mystery or the problem. Rzepka adds that in later works of detective fiction a fourth element also emerged to prominence in detective story i.e. the ‗Puzzle element'. This ‗Puzzle element' introduced in modern detective fiction, added to the thrill and intensity in the work by involving and engaging the reader's reason and logic to figure out the solution to the ongoing problem. Giving the reader access to information important for solving mystery is considered significant by many critics in today's time for the stories of detection. These elements are quite consistent in the detective story. The detectives in question can be officials, privates, professionals, or amateurs. The problem may not always be a mystery but rather a difficulty that needs to be overcome-for example arrest and escape of someone, theft of something and retrieval, etc.These detective suspense tales had a history that dated back to several centuries before. Despite the fact that the most significant works of detective fiction were written in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the origin of the detective novels can be traced several years back in the history of literary writing. Both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin. All native folklore has its ghost tales, while the first four detective stories…hail respectively from the Jewish Apocrypha,
Theoretical and Applied Science
THE EMERGENCE OF DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY2021 •
ISRA (India) = 6.317 ISI (Dubai, UAE) = 1.582 GIF (Australia) = 0.564 JIF = 1.500 SIS (USA) = 0.912 РИНЦ (Russia) = 0.126 ESJI (KZ) = 9.035 SJIF (Morocco) = 7.184 ICV (Poland) = 6.630 PIF (India) = 1.940 IBI (India) = 4.260 OAJI (USA) =
Subject Cultures: The English Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century. Eds. Nora Kuster, Stella Butter, and Sarah Heinz
The Ambivalent Bourgeois: Sherlock Holmes and late Victorian Subjectivities in Detective Fiction2016 •
The article uses detective fiction and Arthur Conan Doyle’s protagonists Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to analyze the crisis of late-bourgeois subject culture towards the end of the 19th century. It shows that the shift from the early bourgeois code of morality to the later code of respectability leads to a deeply felt ambivalence within middle-class subjectivity. In the analysis of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and of short stories from the first collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the article analyse how Holmes and Watson embody bourgeois culture while at the same time also transgressing its boundaries. In the discussion of detective fiction, the article then relates the ambivalences of late-bourgeois subject culture to the genre’s conventions and to the specific reception process that it trains the reader in.
2021 •
This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press.
I look at the relationship between journalism, detective fiction, and the creation of an official detective force in Victorian England and examine the role of class, literacy, and self education in promoting detectives as professional men and women.
This project explores the use of female characters depicted in Victorian detective fiction. It explores texts taken from three distinct periods of the Victorian era; the 1840s, 1860s and 1890s to build a broad picture of the evolving role of female characters in detective narratives as the genre developed from its inception in the early Victorian era to the now famous ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The project contributes to knowledge by examining an understudied aspect of a well-researched genre, and female characters outside of the role of detective in detective-fiction, historically a male-orientated genre. The project argues that female characters are victimised by their respective narratives and authors across the Victorian era, and how this victimisation is represented sympathetically in the early Victorian age, with authors such as Catherine Crowe, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Felix depicting female characters as oppressed by masculine forces. This victimisation becomes more pronounced during the mid-Victorian era, where female characters are depicted as a threat to dominant male power-centres of Victorian society, and are subsequently crushed in the literature. Finally, the project argues how increasing interest in visual culture and the rise of interest in the form of detective fiction itself, coupled with the steadily evolving position of women in Victorian society led to this consistent victimisation of women to be abandoned in favour of representing female characters as occupying assertive, independent and multifarious roles within detective narratives.
Advisor: Professor James Hopkins Master of Arts conferred May 14, 2016 Dissertation completed April 15, 2016 Southern Methodist University Today’s popular culture is inundated with adaptations of and references to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about Great Britain’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. But the private detective’s impact on the Victorian society into which he was born is much more pervasive and far reaching, then and now, than a visit to the little flat on Baker Street could possibly convey. Examining the history of the British private detective both in fiction and in life shows that the figure has been used as a metaphorical plumb-line for English self-conception since the Victorian era. This thesis looks at the British private detective from different points of view– the police, government officials, the public, literature, media, and detectives themselves – and shows how the figure can serve as a compelling historical lens through which to view changes in British culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2017 •
In contrast to the main body of current Victorian detective criticism, which tends to concentrate on Conan Doyle’s creation and only uses other detectives as a backdrop, the texts gathered in this volume examine various contemporary ways of (re)presenting real and fictional detectives that originated in or are otherwise associated with that era: Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Reid, Tobias Gregson, Flaxman Low, and psychiatrists as detectives. Such a collection allows for a critical re-assessment of both the detectives’ importance to the Victorian literature and culture and provides a better basis for understanding the reasons behind their contemporary returns, re-imaginings and re-creations, contributing to the creation of a base for further cultural and critical works dealing with reworkings of the Victorian era.
Between 1900 and 1930, steps were taken on both sides of the Atlantic to delineate, defend, organize, and popularize detective fiction through the publication of articles, introductions, collections, and anthologies, resulting in the construction of a genealogy for the genre.
Journal of Climate
Antarctic Clouds and Radiation within the NCAR Climate Models*2004 •
2013 •
Journal of Research in Nursing
Development and validation of the taste alteration scale for children receiving chemotherapy2018 •
Talanta
Focused ultrasound assisted extraction for the determination of PBDEs in vegetables and amended soil2014 •
2019 •
2022 •
Environment-Behaviour Proceedings Journal
Improving Age-Friendly Environment through Pragmatic Language2014 •
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-Cultural Differences in a Global “Survey of World Views”2014 •
Journal of Vascular Surgery
Effects on Renal Function After Percutaneous Mechanical Thrombectomy Using AngioJet2015 •
International Journal of Social Robotics
A Motivational Approach to Support Healthy Habits in Long-term Child–Robot Interaction2016 •
2014 •
Free Radical Biology and Medicine
Topical electrophilic nitro-fatty acids potentiate cutaneous inflammation2018 •
2004 •
2017 •
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)
Une nécropole de La Tène ancienne à Coulommes-et-Marqueny (08)1993 •
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases
Risk factors for antimony treatment failure in American Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Northwestern-Argentina