ABSTRACT
The rationale for scholarly interest in the detective novel has shifted considerably in recent years. Since the 1970s, academics have often regarded detective fiction, like other popular genre fiction, as a set of conventions and formulas that reaffirm a culture’s dominant ideology, “confirming existing definitions of the world” and attempting to resolve their tensions or contradictions (Cawelti 35). This approach, which retains some critical currency today, views detective fiction as a paradigm and an implement of the hegemonic processes of the Western nation-state, tantalizing readers with aberrant, irrational criminality while assuring them that society ultimately coheres through a shared commitment to reason and law. For scholars such as Franco Moretti, the detective genre “resolves the deep anxiety of an expanding society” and reassures readers “that society is still a great organism: a unitary and knowable body” (143, 145; his emphasis). For more narratologicallyminded critics like Peter Brooks, the crime-and-inquest structure of detective fiction typologizes or lays bare “the structure of all narrative” (25).1 In both of these approaches, the detective novel is reduced to a formulaic, forensically deducible cultural product whose structural conventions reflect knowledge production either
in the abstract or as a dominant (white, Western, capitalist, and nation-statist) cultural practice. Both the sociological and the narratological approaches consider the form and content of the detective novel to be an open and shut case: a matter of how the genre both creates and resolves epistemological and ideological tensions.
