1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910797819203321

Autore

Goulet Andrea

Titolo

Legacies of the Rue Morgue : science, space, and crime fiction in France / / Andrea Goulet

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

0-8122-9216-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (305 p.)

Collana

Critical Authors & Issues

Disciplina

843/.087209

Soggetti

Detective and mystery stories, French - History and criticism

French fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

French fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

French fiction - 21st century - History and criticism

Science in literature

Space and time in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Prologue: Poe -- Chapter 1. Introduction: Mapping Murder -- PART I: ARCHAEOLOGIES -- Chapter 2. Quarries and Catacombs: Underground Crime in Second Empire Romans- feuilletons -- Chapter 3. Skulls and Bones: Paleohistory in Leroux and Leblanc -- Chapter 4. Crypts and Ghosts: Terrains of National Trauma in Japrisot and Vargas -- PART II: INTERSECTIONS -- Chapter 5. Street- Name Mysteries and Private/Public Violence, 1867-2001 -- PART III: CARTOGRAPHIES -- Chapter 6. Terrains Vagues: Gaboriau and the Birth of the Cartographic Mystery -- Chapter 7. Mapping the City: Malet's Mysteries and Butor's Bleston -- Chapter 8. Zéropa- Land: Balkanization and the Schizocartographies of Dantec and Radoman -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Taking Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as an inaugural frame, Andrea Goulet traces shifting representations of violence, space, and nation in French crime fiction from serial novels of the 1860's to cyberpunk fictions today. She argues that the history of spatial sciences-geology, paleontology, cartography-helps elucidate



the genre's fundamental tensions: between brutal murder and pure reason; historical past and reconstructive present; national identity and global networks. As the sciences underlying her analysis make extensive use of strata and grids, Goulet employs vertical and horizontal axes to orient and inform her close readings of crime novels. Vertically, crimes that take place underground subvert above-ground modernization, and national traumas of the past haunt present criminal spaces. Horizontally, abstract crime scene maps grapple with the sociological realities of crime, while postmodern networks of international data trafficking extend colonial anxieties of the French nation. Crime gangs in the catacombs of 1860's Paris. Dirt-digging detectives in coastal caves at the fin-de-siècle. Schizoid cartographers in global cyberspace. Crime fiction's sites of investigation have always exposed central rifts in France's national identity while signaling broader, enduring unease with violent disruptions to social order. Reading murder novels of the last 150 years in the context of shifting sciences, Legacies of the Rue Morgue provides a new spatial history of modern crime fiction.