world CRIME FICTION: VIOLENCE, SEMIOTICS, and GENRE (LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS)
In recent years, crime fiction has become an increasingly transnational genre, not only by virtue of its phenomenal popularity and worldwide circulation, but also because of its syncretic, shape-shifting qualities. As the early Euro-American tradition of crime fiction travelled around the world, it merged with – and fundamentally transformed – a wide range of local literatures. Yet the genre itself was also profoundly transformed as a result of these intercultural encounters, moving far beyond the canonical form it had acquired in Western Europe and North America by the end of the nineteenth century. In this study, Bede Scott focuses on five examples of crime fiction from Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and through a close reading of each narrative, he explores the various ways in which the genre has been influenced by the real-world specificities of its setting. What may have been appropriate in the work of Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, may no longer be appropriate (or even plausible) once the genre has been relocated to Roberto Bolaño’s Ciudad Juárez, Akimitsu Takagi’s Tokyo, or Paulo Lins’ Rio de Janeiro. Under such circumstances, Scott argues, certain sociocultural forces infiltrate the narrative in question, making their presence felt not only at the level of story, where the crimes are committed and the investigations conducted, but also at the discursive level of form, structure, and style. By subjecting this process to close critical scrutiny, World Crime Fiction provides a deeper understanding of the specific forces that have shaped each of these narratives, while also revealing the remarkable diversity and mutability of crime fiction as a global genre.