The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction
Samuel Saunders
ISBN 9780367029616
Routledge
256 Pages
£120.00
PRESENTATION
This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press.
The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Victorian Policing and Victorian Periodicals
Part 1: Policing and Crime in Periodicals
Chapter 1: Periodical Discourse on Policing: c. 1850-1875
Chapter 2: ‘A Condemned Cell with a View’: Crime Journalism c. 1750-1880
Part 2: Memoirs and Sensations
Chapter 3: ‘"Detective" literature, if it may be so called’: The Police Officer and the Police Memoir
Chapter 4: ‘The Romance of the Detective’: Police Memoir Fiction and Sensation Fiction
Part 3: From Scandal to the Strand Magazine
Chapter 5: ‘...people are naturally distrustful of its future working’: The 1877 Detective Scandal in the Victorian Mass Media
Chapter 6: From ‘Handsaw’ to Holmes: Police Officers and Detectives in Late-Victorian Journalism
Conclusion
Index