Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) - Softcover

Frank, L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 023023030X ISBN 13: 9780230230309

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Synopsis

Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. In responding to the writings of figures like Lyell, Darwin and E.B. Taylor, detective fiction initiated a transition from scriptural literalism and a prevailing Natural Theology to a naturalistic, secular worldview. In the process, detective fiction sceptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world.

About this title

About the Author

LAWRENCE FRANK is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self and of essays on nineteenth-century British and American literature and culture that have appeared in various collections and journals, including American Imago, the Dickens Studies Annual, Essays in Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Signs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 023023030X
• ISBN 13: 9780230230309
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261