Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale /

• Main Author: Dechêne, Antoine (Author, http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut)
• Corporate Author: SpringerLink (Online service)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
• Edition: 1st ed. 2018.
• Series: Crime Files
• Subjects: Literature, Modern-20th century.; Literature, Modern-21st century.; America-Literatures.; British literature.; European literature.; Twentieth-Century Literature.; Contemporary Literature.; North American Literature.; British and Irish Literature.; European Literature.
• Physical Description: XII, 347 p. 1 illus. online resource.
• ISBN: 9783319944692
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2

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. .