|
This is part of our crime fiction in translation blog series, showcasing some of the best crime fiction (historical and modern) the non-English speaking world has to offer. Each post will focus on a text or series from a different culture, so stay tuned to expand your reading horizons. Contact [email protected] with recommendations for where/when the series should go next, or send us your own blog post about your country’s/country of research’s crime fiction.
0 Comments
PGR symposium: Crime Narratives on Screen Durham University Mode: Hybrid Date: 10th July 2026 Keynote Speaker: Dr Helen Piper (University of Bristol) Proposal Deadline: May 31st 2026.  Our sixth contributor to the Q & A Blog series is Dr Abby Bentham! Dr. Abby Bentham is a Lecturer in English and Theatre and the Employability Lead for English in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford, Manchester. She is also the co-editor of Divergent Women: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Female Deviance and Dissent (2023).  Our fifth contributor to the Q & Blog series is Dr Dorothea Flothow!
Dr Dorothea Flothow is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria. She is also a Series Editor for the forthcoming edited collection, Global Historical Fictions.  Transportation and Mobility in Crime Fiction
Theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection Guest editors: Sárka Bubiková and Olga Roebuck (University of Pardubice) Proposals due 1 March 2026  Crime Fiction: Retrospection, Futurity, Reinvention
Friday 12th June – Saturday 13th June 2026 University College Dublin Co-organised by Dr Ciara Gorman and Dr Emer O’Beirne  I admit that I was not always a devotee of crime fiction. My academic training focused on American Modernism, and the fact that this period coincided with the “golden age” of crime fiction and the hard-boiled revolution was well obscured in the literary history I was gathering for myself. There were no explicit prohibitions in my program against delving into genre fiction—in fact, one of my dissertation committee members would go on to write a well-received crime novel—but I had gleaned an implicit message that the way to win respect in academia was to focus on the long-established signifiers of credibility. The closest I came to working on genre fiction was a course on the nineteenth-century gothic novel.  1. What first sparked your interest in crime fiction studies?
Like most crime fiction scholars, I came to crime fiction because I’ve always liked to read the genre for fun. I started with the typical children’s crime series like The Three Investigators, the German novel series TKKG (which many German readers probably remember better as audio plays) and the Austrian novel series Die Knickerbockerbande. And then, like most scholars, I moved on to Agatha Christie and had one of my first key experiences with literature when I read And Then There Were None when I was 10. I loved it and afterwards read any of the Christies my school library and the city library had. Getting into the genre itself was really easy but when I studied literature and history, I didn’t see crime fiction being given much of a place in scholarship (mainly because we simply had no specialist in crime fiction studies at my uni at the time) and so it never occurred to me that I could actually study the genre in depth until I was nearly done with my PhD (on, as Maurizio Ascari says, a precursor of Crime Fiction – Gothic). I had taught two courses on crime fiction before because I always thought that the diversity within the genre is a fabulous vehicle to discuss discourses and social narratives besides narratology, but it took another key experience, finding the Call for Papers for the 4th Captivating Criminality Conference and attending that conference in Corsham and meeting with so many fascinating researchers, for me to decide to pursue crime fiction studies as a main focus in my research.  Crime Fiction Studies invites contributions for a themed issue on crime fiction and videogames. Crime and the many facts of its detection are major themes in many videogames, from cozy point-and-click games (such as the long-running Nancy Drew series) to multiple-path morality games (such as Wolf Among Us). Other games not necessarily classed as ‘mystery’ games nevertheless benefit from crime as inciting incidents or moral dilemmas, putting the player in the position of detective, perpetrator, or bystander. By examining the ideological ripples of crime fiction on this interactive storytelling medium, players are asked to engage and often embody themes of justice, morality and crime through avatars and gameplay, offering fruitful avenues for considering the evolution of genre into interactive and often non-linear narrative spaces. How does the element of play impact the themes and expectations of the crime genre? How do different game genres interact with, and produce commentary on, different crime-oriented literary genres?
|
RSS Feed
