City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

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

eng

Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-240) and index

illustrations

index present

Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence

electronic resource

bibliography

Lawrence Frank

Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture

the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

In this study, Lawrence Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between 19th century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens and Doyle., 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