Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction

The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.

"Paul Fox (Ph.D. University of Georgia) is an Associate Professor at East Georgia College. He has published articles upon fin de siècle aesthetics, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Barrie. He is currently completing a book-length study of Decadence and aesthetic time. Koray Melikoglu (Magister Artium Free University Berlin) has published on Kazuo Ishiguro and Shakespeare and edited a volume on Life Writing."

"These important essays underscore how much our understanding of genre owes to the influence of mass culture on the establishment of literary hierarchies." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920