ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of crime fiction studies. It examines early attempts to defend the genre from its many critics, and to codify standards of quality. The chapter then traces more recent developments in crime fiction studies, including the genre’s centrality to the development of key forms of modern literary theory, such as structuralism and post-modernism. It concludes with a discussion of the social turn in the field, or the way in which crime fiction texts have been read as both offering insight into social attitudes and ideologies, and as either re-affirming or challenging them.
