Description
Book SynopsisWhat gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre''s complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre''s emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity, and complexity of the genre''s subsequent thematizations of crime and policingmoving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, D
Trade ReviewPepper offers nothing less than a long history of the crime novel as world literature, its roots in England but its branches universal. * Len Gutkin, Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Crime Fiction as Unwilling Executioner 1: 'A Life of Horrid and Inimitable Wickedness': Crime, Law, and Punishment in Early Eighteenth-century London and Paris 2: 'Let Us Attack Injustice at Its Source': Crime Literature in an Era of Revolution and Reform 3: 'A Mysterious Power Whose Hand is Everywhere': Imagining the State and Codifying the Law in the Mid-nineteenth Century 4: Crime, Business, and Liberty at the Turn of the Century: The Individual, the State, and the Emergence of Modern Capitalism 5: 'No Good for Business': States of Crime in the 1920s and 1930s 6: 'On the Barricades': Crime Fiction and Commitment in an Era of Radical Politics 7: From Sovereignty to Neoliberalism: Crime Fiction in the Contemporary World Conclusion Select Bibliography Index
