Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence : the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Bibliographic Information

Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence : the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Lawrence Frank

(Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture)

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Contexts PART ONE: EDGAR ALLAN POE "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Edgar Allan Poe's Evolutionary Reverie "The Gold-Bug", Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination PART TWO: CHARLES DICKENS Bleak House , the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection and The Mystery of Edwin Drood PART THREE: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Sherlock Holmes and "The Book of Life" Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin and Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles , the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind Epilogue: "A Retrospection" Notes Index

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