Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge

Download or read book Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge written by Antoine Dechêne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.