ABSTRACT
Far from being objective entities, literary genres should be regarded as cultural constructs, the development of which can be analysed in a “meta-critical” mode. The new critical and conceptual openness has given rise to a new interest in the prehistories of modern crime fiction, of which detective fiction is regarded as a subgenre. Despite the climate of experimentation, which invited critics to explore new directions, the prevailing critical paradigm resisted change, as shown by Alma E. The conceptualisation of crime fiction reflects the evolution of the genre in the direction of diversity through a network of transnational exchanges between texts, genres and media, together with metatextual experimentations and concerns. The identification of Gothic fiction as a precursor of nineteenth-century detective and sensation fiction is only a fragment of a huge literary fresco that potentially takes us back in time to Greco-Roman Antiquity and to the Bible, straddling the divide between popular literature and canonical texts.
