Academic literature on the topic 'Fiction/Mystery stories'
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Journal articles on the topic "Fiction/Mystery stories"
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Y, Lalitha. "Postmodernism in the Fiction Synchology Summary of Kumaraselvas Fiction." International Research Journal of Tamil 3, S-1 (June 14, 2021): 132–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.34256/irjt21s121.
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The article Post Modernism, written by writer Kumaraselva, examines the emergence of postmodernism in the short stories Nagamalai, Karatam, Ukilu, Vidalu and Uyirmaranam, and then modernity does not see anything as universal and analyses everything separately. It is also expanding beyond the limits of art and literature to philosophy, politics, lifestyle, technology, architecture, drama, cinema. Postmodernism created myths with a mystery that distorts language, distorts stories and expresses the poetry of the language. It also attracts the attention of the readers and gives them a happy reading experience. It is noteworthy that postmodernism is not theory but also in life.
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Al-Araj, Anna. "Mystical Experiences in the Fiction of Edward Stachura." Ruch Literacki 57, no. 5 (September 1, 2016): 565–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ruch-2017-0084.
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Summary This article examines some aspects of the fiction of Edward Stachura, especially those that lend to it an aura of mystery and unreality. It cannot be denied that some kind of mystical experience (usually wrapped up in borderline situations of death or extreme suffering) lies at heart of his novels and short stories, and remains the object of his unflagging explorations. His fascination with the strange and elusive realms of human experiences can be traced back to his debut novel, All the Brilliance (Ca a jaskrawość). It grew more intense each year to reach its climax in 1977–1979, the time he wrote a collection of short stories Self (Się) and a loose collection of philosophical musings Fabula rasa. These three books seem to be most representative for the evolution of Stachura’s attitude towards ‘the beyond’. Moreover, they provide the best insights into Stachura’s mind, as revealed through his fictional alter egos Edmund Szerucki, Michał Kątny, I-Man and Man-Nobody.
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Brown-Syed, Christopher, and Charles Barnard Sands. "SOME PORTRAYALS OF LIBRARIANS IN FICTION - A DISCUSSION." Education Libraries 21, no. 1-2 (September 5, 2017): 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.26443/el.v21i1-2.111.
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This article explores portrayals of librarians in selected works of fiction, notably those involving mystery or detection. It begins with a summary of information derived from descriptions of about one hundred and twenty contemporary or recent works, then discusses particular stories involving detection or mystery, with occasional references to other genres such as science fiction, historical fiction, espionage, and romance. In 1996, we began to compile a bibliography of fiction involving librarians to accompany a graduate course introducing the profession. Entries were obtained through searches of online catalogues and databases, as well as through queries posted over Internet LISTSERVs. About 120 individual works and about a dozen bibliographies were included in the resulting list. In many instances, librarians and their places of work were presented as intrinsically interesting and appealing. In more than half of the works, librarians played leading or major supporting roles. Following a categorization of the roles of librarians in these works, the article examines images of the profession in the works of Umberto Eco, L.R. Wright, and Charlotte McLeod. We contend that, even in works which present casual glimpses of the profession, or even in those which stress less desirable images of its members, accurate details of its techniques and working realities are sometimes discernible. We suggest that further research concentrate upon the work done by fictitious librarians and upon their centrality to plots.
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Manià, Kirby. "“Translated from the dead”: The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s101 Detectives." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 1 (August 2, 2018): 61–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989418787334.
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In light of the contemporary popularity of crime fiction, true crime, and crime television, avid consumers of these kinds of narratives like to think of themselves as amateur detectives — schooled in the discourse of observation and deduction. Readers of crime fiction become accustomed to a kind of formula, comforted in the knowledge that the mystery will be resolved and the perpetrator apprehended. However, this article investigates how a number of stories in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives challenge the conventions of legibility in representing crime in post-apartheid South Africa. The mediations of language, reading, and writing as modes of detection are shown in these short stories to come up short. Instead, and through the stylistic and formalistic frame provided by the anti-detective genre, acts of detection are defeated, closure is deferred, and order is not restored. Writing crime and violence reveals a matrix of structural violences in the postcolony, experiences that cannot be “translated from the dead”. The article argues that while violence and crime are not unrepresentable per se, the degree to which they can be “managed” or “contained” by language or fiction is limited.
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John, Jerrin Aleyamma. "Serial Killing as a Defence Mechanism: A Study of Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs”." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 7, no. 11 (November 28, 2019): 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v7i11.10123.
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The literary canon carries with it a huge array of possible writings exploring the various contours of fiction, the genre of Detective fiction is one such umbrella term. The effect of mystery and suspense and the surprise factors being hidden away in the pages, keeps the readers glued to detective fiction. This paper explores the plot line of one of the prominent detective stories, Thomas Harris’s ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ in search of certain existential questions regarding the named serial killer in the plot. The social evil of killing the lives of many for the purely pleasure aspect is viewed from multiple viewpoints and a new reading of the plot by placing it within relevant contextual framework is carried out. A traversal through the psychological, behavioural and social norms of the context is explores within the paper.
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Payne, Christopher N. "In/Visible Peoples, In/Visible Lands: Overlapping Histories in Wang Chia-hsiang’s Historical Fantasy." International Journal of Taiwan Studies 2, no. 1 (January 20, 2019): 3–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24688800-00201002.
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This essay considers two narrative texts by the nature essayist and fiction writer Wang Chia-hsiang (Wang Jiaxiang); namely, the short story ‘On Lamatasinsin and Dahu Ali’ (1995), and the short novel Mystery of the Little People (1996). Structured around ethnographic journeys into the Taiwanese mountainous hinterland, the texts concern the main protagonists, two earnest (Han) Taiwanese ethnographers, who narrate stories that traverse the island’s histories, lands, and written remnants. The paper argues that the two stories purposefully overlap multiple historical, colonial, and environmental encounters and temporal moments as a means to fictionalise the past as inherently heterarchical. The tales thus fabulise new literary spaces in which the Taiwanese relationship to yesteryear—the peoples, the lands—can be cognised alternatively.
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Čipkár, Ivan. "Mystery or not? Quantum cognition and the interpretation of the fantastic in Neil Gaiman." Ars Aeterna 8, no. 1 (June 1, 2016): 24–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/aa-2016-0003.
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AbstractThe present paper describes a reader-response experiment focusing on the perception of the genre of the fantastic. It also proposes an update of the genre’s structuralist definition to better conform to contemporary cognitive research. Participants answered questions relating to the interpretation of events and important symbols in a Neil Gaiman short story and were also asked if they considered the story “fantasy” or “realistic fiction.” Tzvetan Todorov characterized the fantastic as a hesitation between the uncanny (realistic interpretation) and the marvelous (supernatural interpretation). Neil Gaiman, a popular contemporary author of genre fiction, has utilized this hesitation between psychological and supernatural explanations of his stories to great effect. The results show a consistently higher degree of enjoyment in readers who were aware of the dual interpretation and partook in the hesitation. This paper also introduces the concept of quantum cognition into literary theory and explains the benefit of using terminology from this discipline in a reader-response context. The findings of this study could be the first step towards a better understanding of the different ways in which readers cognitively approach the fantastic or genre in general.
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Bryant, John. "Melville Essays the Romance: Comedy and Being in Frankenstein, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," and Moby-Dick." Nineteenth-Century Literature 61, no. 3 (December 1, 2006): 277–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2006.61.3.277.
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John Bryant, "Melville Essays the Romance: Comedy and Being in Frankenstein, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," and Moby-Dick (pp. 277-310)This essay argues that romance is not a fixed genre but a process of writing ("romancing")that Melville used at a particular moment in his career to engage in certain "ontological heroics," that is, confront the problem of Being (the mystery of the origins and reality of consciousness). The inadequacy of genre is asserted as the notion is observed to deconstruct in three ways, and it is replaced by six "Notes toward a Supreme Romance," which delineate elements in the process of romancing with examples from Michel de Montaigne's notion of essaying and Nathaniel Hawthorne's own definition of Romance as "careering on the verge." In applying these notes to Melville's romancing of structure and voice in Moby-Dick (1851), the essay first explores the structural framing technique in Mary Shelley's Gothic fiction, Frankenstein (1818, 1831), and its comic counterpart in Thomas Bangs Thorpe's classic tall tale, "The Big Bear of Arkansas"(1854). Both works conceal certain secrets of identity (or mysteries of selfhood and being)through nestings of voices (stories within stories) that culminate in a symbolic being(monster or bear). In Moby-Dick this model of "fictive essaying" is exhibited in "Cetology"(chapter 32), in which Ishmael cons the reader with a joke-within-a-joke structure that sexualizes the whale and thereby allows us unexpectedly to identify with the whale, which in the process also symbolizes the creative roots of Being. By essaying or "romancing" structure and symbol, Melville in effect tricks himself and his reader into a closer relation to the mystery of consciousness.
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Daechsel, Markus. "ālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 13, no. 1 (April 2003): 21–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1356186302002973.
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AbstractDetective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence – both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.
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Middleton, Rowan. "“The game is afoot”: Sherlock Holmes, hermeneutics and collaborative writing." Ars Aeterna 12, no. 1 (June 1, 2020): 29–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/aa-2020-0003.
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AbstractSir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories involve a hermeneutic game in which Holmes attempts to uncover the mystery of unsolved crime. The work of Hans-Georg Gadamer enables Holmes’s methods to be seen as both playful and creative as he seeks to understand what G. K. Chesterton refers to as the poetry of the modern world. Holmes is therefore a creative and scientific detective, one who loses himself in the game of detection in order to find himself in the search for truth in the wider world. Through the agency of Dr Watson, the reader is invited to join the game and attempt to work out the solution to the mystery as the narrative unfolds before them. Peter Hühn’s work on the detective as reader and writer is extended in relation to the work of understanding and creation carried out by authors who add new works to the genre of Holmesian fiction. This process is explored in the context of two playful writing workshops in which participants passed the opening of a piece of Holmesian fiction they had written to another participant to continue, before sharing the results with the group. Hans Robert Jauss’s ideas about genre and other perspectives on reimagining Holmes help contextualize the strategies used by participants, while Gadamer’s conception of the festive enables insights into the communal processes of creation and understanding.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Fiction/Mystery stories"
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Wallis-Martin, Julia Wallis-Martin Julia. "Crime fiction and the publishing market /." St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/710.
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Nuñez, Gabriela. "Investigating La Frontera : transnational space in contemporary Chicana/o and Mexican detective fiction /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2007. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3286241.
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Wallis-Martin, Julia. "Crime fiction and the publishing market." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/710.
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The thesis is mainly a substantial part of a crime novel, the title of which is 6, Vermillion Crescent. In that novel, a girl of 14 is murdered by her foster brother. On his release from prison, the former foster child goes in search of his victim’s mother with the intention of murdering her for betraying and abandoning him. The idea for the novel was sparked by events that occurred over 18 years ago, and coincided with the publication of my first novel. There have been a number of changes within the publishing industry since then, and in the critical piece accompanying the novel extract, I explain the most significant of these changes. The critical piece includes a detailed synopsis of 6, Vermillion Crescent.
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Pendrill, Michael Laurie. "A guilty satisfaction : detective fiction and the reader." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/40838/.
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The purpose of this thesis is to explore the reasons why readers choose to read detective fiction. Taking Thomas De Quincey's satirical identification of the aesthetic quality of murder, I look at Edgar Allan Poe's detective fiction to find a non-satiric version of the same argument that emphasises the balancing quality of the ethical to the aesthetic. W.H. Auden's essay “The Guilty Vicarage” offers an argument concerning the reader's position in relation to these opposite components. I explore the ways in which Auden's arguments build into Freud's understanding of guilt, daydreams, the moral conscience, jokes, the uncanny and the death drive, and how these can be applied to the genre to help illustrate the reader's experience. Concurrent to this I offer an analysis of how the parallel developments in literary theory, particularly those of Barthes and Shklovsky, can be incorporated to enrich the understanding of these Freudian positions within the modern reader's experience. It is my intention to open up a field of study within the genre that differs from the traditional Marxist approach. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of the experience of pleasure found when moments of commonality between the aesthetic and the ethical are reached– how these are often unsatisfactory– necessitating a repetition of the literary experience. It is my argument that such an approach to the reader's position within the genre has not been explored in such a detailed fashion, centring as it does upon the active role of guilt in pleasure felt by the reader as the motivation to repeat. To illustrate that this is an argument that is applicable to different historical phases of detective fiction the study undertakes analysis of the following authors: Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene and John Fowles.
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Chino, Noriko. "Miyabe Miyuki's place in the development of Japanese mystery fiction." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1230340838.
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Cleveland, William. ""Why is Everyone So Interested in Texts?": The Shifting Role of the Reader in the Genre of Hard-boiled Fiction." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/ClevelandW2007.pdf.
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Yuan, Honggeng. "From conventional to experimental : the making of Chinese metaphysical detective fiction /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1999. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B21556398.
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Taylor, Leslie Charles. "The Greatest is Love." FIU Digital Commons, 2018. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3661.
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THE GREATEST IS LOVE is a collection of ten short stories showing the painful manifestations of romantic relationships in the lives of contemporary American characters from many walks of life.
As in the stories of D.H. Lawrence, these characters are often driven towards what may be bad for them, finding that love overrides their rational thoughts. In “The Mechanic” a woman whose legal career has left her isolated becomes irresistibly attracted to her friend’s ex-husband. Three stories center on one character, Charles, whose early failures both in college and at work lead him to become a detective, only to be tempted to betray his new calling by a woman who leads him astray.
As in Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, the stories in THE GREATEST IS LOVE combine the pain and comedy of passion. Even when it is challenging, love offers characters irresistible glimmers of hope.
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Smillie, Rachel Jane. "The lady vanishes : women writers and the development of detective fiction." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2014. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=225765.
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The history of detective fiction has frequently centred on three key figures: Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. These writers hold a privileged place in the canon of detective fiction and represent key sites in a linear narrative of development which has often overlooked the complexity and variability of the detective genre. This dissertation explores the disappearance of female writers from the critical history of detective fiction. Focusing on the mystery and detective narratives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, LT Meade, Baroness Emmuska Orczy and CL Pirkis, this project aims to restore these overlooked authors to critical view. As this dissertation will argue, the erasure of these writers (among others) from critical histories of detective fiction has led to studies of the genre being based on a limited data set. This unstable foundation has resulted in a number of problematic assumptions about the nascent detective genre; namely, that it is conservative, prescriptive and phallocentric. By exploring the work of overlooked and forgotten writers, this project aims to explore the paradigms which have governed their disappearance; at the same time, this dissertation will examine established critical models and interrogate entrenched assumptions and approaches to detective fiction. Chapter one explores the figure of the female servant as household spy in Braddon's novels and considers her role in opposition to Braddon's male detectives. Chapter two focuses on the collaboratively-authored crime fiction of LT Meade; in particular, it addresses the battle for narrative agency and control which occurs in her texts and examines the breakdown of gender and genre roles. Chapter three considers Orczy's work in the context of the anxiety of the author and explores the potentially restrictive nature of genre fiction. Finally, chapter four addresses CL Pirkis's detective fiction alongside her work in other genres and uses these texts to interrogate traditional models of detective fiction.
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Kindler, Jessica Claire. "Tokuya Higashigawa's After-Dinner Mysteries: Unusual Detectives in Contemporary Japanese Mystery Fiction." PDXScholar, 2013. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/1011.
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The detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu) genre is one that came into Japan from the West around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), and soon became wildly popular. Again in recent years, detective fiction has experienced a popularity boom in Japan, and there has been an outpouring of new detective fiction books as well as various television and movie adaptations. It is not a revelation that the Japanese detective fiction genre, while rife with imitation and homage to Western works, took a dramatic turn somewhere along the line, away from celebrated models like Poe, Doyle, and Christie, and developed into a unique subgenre of Japanese prose. However, despite its popularity and innovation, Japanese detective fiction has often been categorized as popular literature (taishū bungaku), which is historically disregarded as vulgar and common.
My thesis first consists of a brief introductory history oftantei shōsetsugenre in Japan. This includes a discussion of Japanese writers' anxiety concerning imitation of Western forms and their perception of themselves as imposters and imitators. Following this, I examine the ways in whichtantei shōsetsuwriters--particularly Edogawa Ranpo (1894 - 1965), the grandfather of the genre in Japan--began to deviate from the Western model in the 1920's. At the same time, I investigate the bias againsttantei shōsetsuas a vulgar or even pornographic genre. Through a discussion of literary critic Karatani Kōjin's ideas on the construction of depth in literature, I will demonstrate how Edogawa created, through his deviance from the West, a new kind of construction in detective fiction to bring a different sort of depth to what was generally considered merely a popular and shallow genre.
This discussion includes a look at the ideas of Tsubouchi Shōyō on writing modern novels, and Japanese conceptions of "pure" (junsui) and "popular" (taishū) literature. Through an examination of several of Edogawa's works and his use of psychology in creating interiority in his characters, I propose that the depth configuration, put forth by Karatani in his critique of canonical modern Japanese literature, is also present in popular fiction, like Edogawa'stantei shōsetsu. When viewed through the lens of Karatani's depth paradigm, we discover how detective fiction and the vulgarity therein may actually have more in common with "pure" fiction created by those writers who followed Shōyō's prescriptions.
In the final section of the introduction, I propose a definition of Japanese detective fiction that links Edogawa's works from the 1920's to the contemporary Japanese detective novel After-Dinner Mysteries (Nazotoki wa dinaa no ato de, 2010), by Higashigawa Tokuya. Thus we see that many of the themes and conventions present in Edogawa remain prevalent in contemporary writing. Finally, I present my translation of the first two chapters of After-Dinner Mysteries.
Books on the topic "Fiction/Mystery stories"
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Gilbert, Elliot L. The World of Mystery Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.
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K, Kamerman Sylvia, ed. Writing mystery and crime fiction. Boston: The Writer, 1985.
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Make mine a mystery: A reader's guide to mystery and detective fiction. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2003.
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Barnett, Colleen A. Mystery women: An encyclopedia of leading women characters in mystery fiction. South Bend, IN: Ravenstone Books, 1997.
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Make mine a mystery II: A reader's guide to mystery and detective fiction. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2011.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Fiction/Mystery stories"
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Trensky, Paul I. "Detective and Mystery Stories." In The Fiction of Josef Škvorecký, 118–25. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21531-7_11.
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Hartley, John Cameron. "Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction." In The Gothic and Death. Manchester University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.003.0009.
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This chapter examines the ‘Lost World’ genre, a staple of late-Victorian popular fiction, exemplified by H. Rider Haggard’s stories featuring Allan Quatermain, and Ayesha, known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. These fin-de-siècle tales, while ostensibly celebrating British Imperialism and the continuation of colonial power, reveal layers of anxiety concerning degeneration, the collapse of civilisation, the rise of the Victorian ‘new woman’, and perhaps most potently the fear of death. Canadian writer James De Mille, in his book A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, inverted Victorian values to satirise the capitalist economy, and the glorification of war, by creating the Lost World of the Kosekin where wealth is a burden and death worshipped. The presentation of the Lost World as a Gothic Space allows for a critical examination of the way that Victorian cultural certainties were challenged, by divergent belief systems, and the mystery and terror of death.
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Nurhussein, Nadia. "George S. Schuyler and the Appeal of Imperial Ethiopia." In Black Land, 169–91. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691190969.003.0008.
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This chapter focuses on two of George S. Schuyler's novellas published serially in the African American newspaper called The Pittsburgh. It talks about “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and International Intrigue” and “Revolt in Ethiopia: A Tale of Black Insurrection against Italian Imperialism,” which were both written in response to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. These novellas interact and engage with the newspaper's propagandistic reportage of the war in provocative ways. Schuyler's fiction mimicked the articles formally, encouraging in the newspaper's readers a fluid reading practice transcending the fictional/nonfictional divide. Schuyler in the 1930s was able to assume his readers' intimate familiarity with the contemporary nation and therefore actively manipulate the newspaper's generic features. In his melodramatic Ethiopian stories, Schuyler exploits the public's fascination with monarchy only to expose, in the end, the ironies behind that misguided sympathy.
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Ahmed, Maaheen. "Noir, Black Comedy, and Crime." In Openness of Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496805935.003.0004.
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The works described and analyzed here incorporate features from the noir both visually and in their stories. The first two comics, Tardi’sAdèle Blanc-Sec series and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, alter the conventions of crime and mystery in varying degrees. While the Adèleseries adheres to comics conventions, From Hell weaves several perspectives around the case of Jack the Ripper, bringing in a meta-fictional level that problematizes the very telling of the story. Focusing on mortal superheroes deprived of their powers, Marko Turunen and AnnemariHietanen’sDeath Walks on Its Hind Legs and Jyrki Heikkinen’sDr. Futuroincorporate thenoir elements of anti-heroes and hopeless circumstances. Black comedy, which is already rudimentarily present in Adèle, acquires a more self-reflexive facet in the last two comics by subverting the clichés attached to superheroes and underscoring the fine line between the human and the inhuman.