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

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. "This study is an original contribution to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies in its methodology, its subject matter, and its vision of detective fiction. It engages in a form of intellectual paleontology, tracing the genealogy of a genre through a model based on the Origin of Species read as a form of postmodern historiography. It places detective fiction within the context of popular scientific texts by John Pringle Nichol, Robert Chambers, Winwood Reade, and John Tyndall, as well as the writings of Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley. Frank does not treat detective fiction only as the symptom of a prevailing ideology, but investigates it as a genre promoting a secular worldview in a time of competing visions of the universe and the human situation. Such an approach necessitates close readings of scientific and literary texts that, through explicit and implicit allusions to cosmology, philology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, reveal their ultimate seriousness and heterodoxy."--Jacket. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Contexts....Pages 1-26 Front Matter....Pages 27-28 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie....Pages 29-43 “The Gold-Bug,” Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination....Pages 44-67 Front Matter....Pages 69-70 Bleak House, the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative....Pages 71-98 News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood ....Pages 99-130 Front Matter....Pages 131-132 Sherlock Holmes and “The Book of Life”....Pages 133-153 Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Doyle....Pages 154-175 The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind....Pages 176-201 Epilogue: A Retrospection....Pages 202-207 Back Matter....Pages 208-249 "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 skeptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world."--Publisher description

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 skeptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world.

In this innovative book, now available in paperback for the first time, Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and Darwin's theories of evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle In The Dialogic Imagination Mikhail Bakhtin uses evolutionary metaphors to argue that as historical circumstances change, certain literary genres become extinct or endure at best as living fossils, while new genres appear in response to new and perplexing situations.