Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.
Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.
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"Metaphysical detective stories reveal much about the relation of modernism to postmodernism and of high to low literary culture. Detecting Texts makes an excellent case for the coherence and breadth of the genre. Its broad scope, clear writing, and notable contributions to a number of literary subfields are among its many virtues."—Shawn Rosenheim, Williams College
"No currently available anthology addresses the topic of the metaphysical detective story so directly, so fully, or so relevantly."—Brian McHale, West Virginia University
About the Author
Patricia Merivale is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of British Columbia. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
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excellent resource,
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This review is from: Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Paperback)
Detecting Texts is a wonderful resource for those interested in the metaphysical detective story. It contains some of the most insightful essays I have ever read on the subject. The essays in this book provided me with excellent raw materials for my essays and ideas. Thank you to all the contributors for providing such innovative ideas on a relatively new literary genre.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Let me start with a simple-minded question: How does one write analytic detective fiction as high art when the genre's basic structure, its central narrative mechanism, seems to discourage the unlimited rereading associated with serious writing? Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
metaphysical detection, metaphysical detective fiction, metaphysical detective story, roman detective novel, hanged sparrow, spurious key text, metaphysical detective stories, analytic detective story, prize text, paranoic system, postmodern mystery, doomed detective, spatial detection, classical detective story, royal boudoir, purloined letter, nome della rosa, temporal loop, detective genre, nouveau roman, red notebook, numerical structure, armchair detective, explanation scene, postmodernist fiction Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Liddell Hart, The Erasers, William Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, The Garden of Forking Paths, Edgar Allan, Rue Morgue, Agatha Christie, The Name of the Rose, Father Brown, Premeditated Crime, Peter Stillman, Ten Little Indians, Les Gommes, Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Kerrigan, Foucault's Pendulum, Johns Hopkins University Press, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Auguste Dupin, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, The Crying of Lot New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
Let me start with a simple-minded question: How does one write analytic detective fiction as high art when the genre's basic structure, its central narrative mechanism, seems to discourage the unlimited rereading associated with serious writing? Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
metaphysical detection, metaphysical detective fiction, metaphysical detective story, roman detective novel, hanged sparrow, spurious key text, metaphysical detective stories, analytic detective story, prize text, paranoic system, postmodern mystery, doomed detective, spatial detection, classical detective story, royal boudoir, purloined letter, nome della rosa, temporal loop, detective genre, nouveau roman, red notebook, numerical structure, armchair detective, explanation scene, postmodernist fiction Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Liddell Hart, The Erasers, William Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, The Garden of Forking Paths, Edgar Allan, Rue Morgue, Agatha Christie, The Name of the Rose, Father Brown, Premeditated Crime, Peter Stillman, Ten Little Indians, Les Gommes, Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Kerrigan, Foucault's Pendulum, Johns Hopkins University Press, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Auguste Dupin, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, The Crying of Lot New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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20
books
cite this book:
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- The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Konemann Classics) by Edgar Allan Poe on 20 pages
- The Complete Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton on 14 pages
- The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story by John T. Irwin on 9 pages
- The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster on 7 pages
- Jorge Luis Borges (Columbia Essays on Modern Writers) by Jaime Alazraki on 5 pages
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- The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Martin Priestman on page 264, page 265, and Back Matter
- Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction by Suzanne Keen in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories by Laurence Roth in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative) by Lisa Zunshine in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Narrative Form by Suzanne Keen in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
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