Reading into Murder: Interpretative essays on 13 cult texts

Abstracts are invited for an edited book titled "Reading into Murder: interpretative essays on 13 cult texts". The book will be a collection of 13 critical papers (invited) on the 13 selected cult texts.

​The aim shall be to present a broad view and an in-depth scholarship on the highest level of crime, murder, and its interpretation, detection and/or denouement in the select cult/classic works of literature, both drama and fiction, ranging works from Greek tragedy, Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Jacobian tragedy, classic British detective fiction, modernist English verse drama, Bengali detective fiction, European and American fiction (Umberto Eco from Italy;Arnaldur Indriðason from Iceland, Jed Rubenfeld from USA and Latin American fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia through most pertinent/relevant theoretical lenses

The literary texts selected for study are the following:

1. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) 
2. Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy ( perf. 1582-92)
3. William Shakespeare Hamlet (perf. 1609)
4. John Webster  The Duchess of Malfi (perf. 1612-13)
5. Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) 
6. Dorothy L Sayers Whose Body (1923)
7. Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
8. T S Eliot Murder in the Cathedral (1935) 
9. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay Sajarur Kaanta (Porcupine Quills) (1967) 
10. Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose (1980)
11. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)   
12.       Arnaldur Indriðason Jar City (2000) 
13. Jed Rubenfeld Interpretation of Murder (2006)

Thus, the book will adopt an eclectic approach selecting texts from ancient Greek tragedy to most recent bestsellers of the 2000s to understand the theme of murder as crime in literatures through the ages and cultures.

The proposal has been presented to a publishing house of international reputation. The house is interested and has asked for further detailed description of the edited volume. At this stage they have asked for the name and affiliation of the chapter contributors and the following:

1. Working title of the chapter/paper 
2. Abstract of 150 words
3. Likely word length of the chapter including notes and bibliography
4. If the paper may use copyright material, they have requested necessary permissions be taken for the same.
5. If the chapter will include photograph, chart, table, graph, diagram, line drawing, sketches, cartoon, plates, diacritical marks, map.

At this stage only the abstract and title of the paper, with keywords, approximate word length and a brief bio note will suffice. Final decision on publication rests on the publication house after assessment of final papers/manuscript.

Feel free to contact me at debayandebbarman@gmail.com.

Abstracts due by 15 August, 2020.