Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T19:31:30.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Detection and literary fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Martin Priestman
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
Get access

Summary

Detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature. On the one hand, detective fiction, like other genre fictions, is seen as a popular and lesser subset of high or 'proper' literature. On the other, the literature of detection, with its complex double narrative in which an absent story, that of a crime, is gradually reconstructed in the second story (the investigation), its uses of suspense, and its power to give aesthetic shape to the most brute of matter, has been seen as paradigmatic of literary narrative itself. Tzvetan Todorov's 'The Typology of Detective Fiction', which remains one of the most significant contributions to the field, sought to uphold the distinction between 'genre fiction' and 'literature' (as a question of structure rather than of value). However, his identification of the two orders of story, inquest and crime, as equivalents to the Russian formalist distinction between sjuzet and fabula (often translated as 'discourse' and 'story' respectively), makes the detective story, as Peter Brooks writes, 'the narrative of narratives', its classical structure a laying-bare of the structure of all narrative in that it dramatises the role of sjuzet and fabula and the nature of their relation.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×