[en] This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.
Disciplines :
Literature
Author, co-author :
Dechene, Antoine ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de langues modernes : ling., litt. et trad. > Littérature anglaise moderne et littérature américaine
Language :
English
Title :
Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge: Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale