Re-Reading Golden Age Crime Writing

Time, Space, and Place
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-82264-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 188 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 424 g

Reihe: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Re-Reading Golden Age Crime Writing: Time, Space, and Place intervenes in debates on crime literature by offering the first sustained analysis of British and American Golden Age fiction, broadly spanning the 1910s to the 1950s, through the interrelated yet analytically distinct frameworks of time, space, and place.

It shows how each dimension shapes both the genre and individual texts and how their interactions generate specific narrative, thematic, and ideological effects. Building on recent scholarship that understands crime fiction as mobile, composite, and open to continual reinterpretation, the volume foregrounds the thematic richness, theoretical sophistication, and experimental energies of Golden Age writing. It proposes a coherent critical framework and flexible set of tools for rethinking the genre. Drawing on paradigms such as Bakhtin’s chronotope, islandness, heterotopia, human geography, hauntology, psychogeography, and spatial discourse analysis, the contributors demonstrate how time, space, and place structure narrative possibility, organise perception, and mediate questions of crime, knowledge, justice and power.

Combining diverse theoretical paradigms, the book reconceptualises Golden Age crime fiction’s formal and ideological complexity and highlights its continuing relevance for contemporary debates about crime, justice, and narrative form.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Sarah

Serafini, Stefano

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction Sarah Martin and Stefano Serafini; PART I Time; 1 ‘It Doesn’t Keep Particularly Good Time’: Adolescence, Time and Timelessness in the Early Nancy Drew Books; 2 Time Out in and from Murder Is Easy; 3 ‘I had No Idea That I Was Contributing to the Rewriting of History’: Temporality, Hauntological Spectres, and the Time-Travelling Detective in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time; PART II Space; 4 ‘Everything is Known on Board a Ship’: The Heterotopic Closed Community in Rufus King’s Murder by Latitude; 5 Wild Spaces: Domestic Bewilderment in the Novels of Christianna Brand; 6 Subverting the Surplus Woman: The Psychogeographic Spinster Detective in Unnatural Death; PART III Place; 7 ‘Tir Nan Og Is Just One Jump West’: Therapeutic Landscapes in Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands; 8 ‘When Things Become a Little Abnormal’: Place and Character Psychology in Gladys Mitchell’s The Rising
of the Moon; 9 ‘Here Be Dragons to Be Slain’: Dorothy L. Sayers, Place and Disruptive Detection

Über Autor(innen)

Sarah Martin is Visiting Lecturer in Crime Fiction at the University of Chester, where she recently gained her PhD. She is Co-Director of Golden Age Mysteries ltd., which runs the Agatha Christie and Golden Age of Crime conferences, and has published widely on Golden Age detective fiction.

Stefano Serafini is an EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University and the University of Padua. He is the author of Gothic Italy: Crime, Science and Literature after Unification (University of Toronto Press, 2024) and Italian Crime Fiction Revisited: Authority, Detection, and the Supernatural, 1861–1941 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).