ABSTRACT
Crime fiction is arguably the most internationalised genre of popular literature; its basic conventions are recognisable across time, space and media, but also rich in local variations and cultural contexts. Crime fiction is a pertinent example of world literature, a literary phenomenon, or a mode of reading, which has received increasing attention in twenty-first-century literary studies. This chapter discusses how a world literature approach may set askew the national horizon that has dominated crime fiction studies. It explores Swedish writer Henning Mankell’s Den vita lejoninnan as an example of how a world literature perspective may help us read crime fiction across borders. A world literature perspective would consider such transnational networks intrinsic to our understanding of Sherlock Holmes’s literary world and vast appeal to readers in multiple locations. Crime fiction can enter world literature by processes different from the transnational circulation of stories through translation or generic reproducibility by simply, as Damrosch suggests, “bringing the world directly into text itself”.
