Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

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.

Author: L. Frank
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 07/02/2003
Pages: 249
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.99lbs
Size: 8.62h x 6.48w x 1.04d
ISBN: 9781403911391

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2004 pg. 1078

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.