Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

by L. Frank

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403911391
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	07/02/2003
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

LAWRENCE FRANK is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self and of essays on nineteenth-century British and American literature and culture that have appeared in various collections and journals, including American Imago, the Dickens Studies Annual, Essays in Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Signs.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Contexts PART ONE: EDGAR ALLAN POE "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Edgar Allan Poe's Evolutionary Reverie "The Gold-Bug", Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination PART TWO: CHARLES DICKENS Bleak House , the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection and The Mystery of Edwin Drood PART THREE: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Sherlock Holmes and "The Book of Life" Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin and Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles , the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind Epilogue: "A Retrospection" Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

'Frank's Victorian Detective Fiction will appeal to historians of science and literary scholars... His analysis is extremely skilful, well written and convincingly argued'

- Anne Schwan, Journal of Victorian Culture

From the Publisher