Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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English

Publikace detail

Changing Landscapes of Contemporary American Crime Fiction

Autoři: Bubíková Šárka

Rok: 2022

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Changing Landscapes of Contemporary American Crime Fiction	This was an invited keynote speech presenting results of a long research project. In a well-known 1931 essay on popular literature in general and crime fiction in particular, Czech writer and dramatist Karel Čapek, himself a fan of detective stories, claimed that in detective fiction things exist only as traces and characters are nothing but sets of traces for the detection. His observations were fitting for the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction because the novels were mostly focused on the unexpected twists of plot, the mystery, the puzzle, or, in the words of Dagmar Mocná, on “the intellectual game.” Their setting represented a mere background or a scene of crime, which provided a specific atmosphere enhancing the crime’s atrocity, creating specific mood or supplying the investigator with special clues. Modern crime fiction uses its setting for many more purposes, ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters, etc. As I will try to show in my presentation, some eighty years later Čapek’s assertion is no longer true because many crime novels create settings far richer and detailed than is necessary for the unfolding of the whodunit plot. I will also attempt to show that although the contemporary heightened interest in the role of places and spaces in literary works has been mainly focused on classic works or the so-called high-brow texts, it can yield interesting results when aimed at popular genres, such as crime fiction.	contemporary American crime fiction; place and space; urban setting; wilderness setting