1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910777871003321

Titolo

Postcolonial Postmortems : Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective / / edited by Christine Matzke, Susanne Mühleisen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Leiden; ; Boston : , : BRILL, , 2006

ISBN

94-012-0306-7

1-4294-5632-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (346 p.)

Collana

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; ; 102

Disciplina

823

Soggetti

Crime in literature - Cross-cultural studies

Detective and mystery stories - History and criticism

Postcolonialism in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgements -- Christine MATZKE and Susanne MÜHLEISEN: Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives -- Stephen KNIGHT: Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness -- Wendy KNEPPER: Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost -- Tobias DÖRING: Sherlock Holmes - He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans -- Suchitra MATHUR: Holmes's Indian Reincarnation: A Study in Postcolonial Transposition -- Katja SARKOWSKY: Manga, Zen, and Samurai: Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura Novels including an interview with Sujata Massey -- Vera ALEXANDER: Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Crossing: Cinnamon Gardens and The Sandglass -- Elfi BETTINGER: Riddles in the Sands of the Kalahari: Detectives at Work in Botswana -- Geoffrey V. DAVIS: Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind: The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn -- A.B. Christa SCHWARZ: Colonial Struggle on Manhattan Soil: George Schuyler's 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' -- Xavier PONS: 'Redneck Wonderland': Robert G. Barrett's Crime Fiction -- Patricia PLUMMER: Transcultural British Crime Fiction: Mike Phillips's Sam Dean Novels



including an interview with Mike Phillips -- References -- Notes on contributors -- Name index -- Subject index.

Sommario/riassunto

Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emergent form of crime fiction. But what does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity? And why 'postmortems'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts. This collection interrogates literary concepts of postcoloniality and crime from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and postcolonial literatures. International scholars offer insights into the 'postcolonial postmortems' of a wide range of texts by authors from Africa, South Asia, the Asian and African Diaspora, and Australia, including Robert G. Barrett, Unity Dow, Wessel Ebersohn, Romesh Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sujata Massey, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Ondaatje.