Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence
Subtitle: the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle
By: Lawrence Frank.
Series: Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
Subjects: Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 -- Characters -- Sherlock Holmes.; Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.; Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Fictional works.; Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.; Detective and mystery stories, English -- History and criticism.; Literature and science -- English-speaking countries.; Detective and mystery stories, American -- History and criticism.; Popular literature -- English-speaking countries -- History and criticism.; Forensic sciences -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 19th century.; English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character); Private investigators in literature.; Evidence, Criminal, in literature.; Science in literature.
Description: "This study is an original contribution to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies in its methodology, its subject matter, and its vision of detective fiction. It engages in a form of intellectual paleontology, tracing the genealogy of a genre through a model based on the Origin of Species read as a form of postmodern historiography. It places detective fiction within the context of popular scientific texts by John Pringle Nichol, Robert Chambers, Winwood Reade, and John Tyndall, as well as the writings of Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley. Frank does not treat detective fiction only as the symptom of a prevailing ideology, but investigates it as a genre promoting a secular worldview in a time of competing visions of the universe and the human situation. Such an approach necessitates close readings of scientific and literary texts that, through explicit and implicit allusions to cosmology, philology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, reveal their ultimate seriousness and heterodoxy."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-240) and index.