Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence : The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle.
Title:
Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence : The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle.
Author:
Frank, Lawrence.
ISBN:
9780230279704
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (262 pages)
Series:
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Contents:
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Contexts -- Part One: Edgar Allan Poe -- 1 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Edgar Allan Poe's Evolutionary Reverie -- 2 "The Gold-Bug," Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination -- Part Two: Charles Dickens -- 3 Bleak House, the Nebular Hypothesis and a Crisis in Narrative -- 4 News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood -- Part Three: Arthur Conan Doyle -- 5 Sherlock Holmes and "The Book of Life" -- 6 Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Doyle -- 7 The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind -- Epilogue: A Retrospection -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. In responding to the writings of figures like Lyell, Darwin and E.B. Taylor, detective fiction initiated a transition from scriptural literalism and a prevailing Natural Theology to a naturalistic, secular worldview. In the process, detective fiction sceptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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