The Cambridge Companion To World Crime Fiction

The first systematic account of crime fiction as a global genre, offering unprecedented coverage of distinct traditions across the world.

This Companion covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the 'detective' fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in the eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women and black detectives, crime on film and TV, police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.

This Companion examines the range of American crime fiction from execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programmes like The Sopranos.

An overview of popular literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day from a historical and comparative perspective.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse traditions of inquiry and in connection with a variety of media, from film and television, to storytelling in the 'real-life' contexts of face-to-face interaction, to literary fiction. Each chapter presents a survey of scholarly approaches to topics such as character, dialogue, genre or language, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research. Featuring a chapter reviewing definitions of narrative, a glossary of key terms and a comprehensive index, this is an essential resource for both students and scholars in many fields, including language and literature, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, jurisprudence, communication and media studies, and the social sciences.

This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.

"Entertaining and authoritative, this alphabetically arranged companion is an indispensable reference guide to crime and mystery writing. Unique in its biographical and critical treatment of major detective writers, it is a comprehensive digest to the gen