Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence : the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Resource Information

The work Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence : the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence : the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Title remainder

the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Statement of responsibility

Lawrence Frank

Creator

• Frank, Lawrence, 1933-

Subject

• Detective and mystery stories, English -- History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• History
• Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Detective and mystery stories, American -- History and criticism
• Private investigators in literature
• Forensic sciences -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
• Science in literature
• Popular literature -- English-speaking countries -- History and criticism
• Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Fictional works
• Forensic sciences -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 19th century
• Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930 -- Characters | Sherlock Holmes
• Evidence, Criminal, in literature
• Holmes, Sherlock
• Literature and science -- English-speaking countries

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• History

Language

eng

Summary

"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

Member of

• Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

823/.08720908

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PR878.D4

LC item number

F73 2003

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture