world CRIME FICTION: VIOLENCE, SEMIOTICS, and GENRE (LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS)
My current book project focuses on crime fiction from outside the Euro-American tradition, with a particular emphasis on narratives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In recent years, crime fiction has become an increasingly transnational genre, and this study explores the various changes it has undergone as it has travelled around the world, responding to the sociocultural specificities of countries such as Mexico, Ghana, Colombia, Japan, and Brazil. By subjecting narratives from each of these countries to close critical scrutiny, I hope to gain a better understanding of the way in which they have been shaped by their real-world settings – not only at the representational level, where the crimes are committed and the investigations conducted, but also at a deeper structural or semiotic level, where the discursive substance of the narrative itself is generated.