Postcolonial postmortems; crime fiction from a transcultural perspective

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006

Postcolonial postmortems; crime fiction from a transcultural perspective.

Ed. by Christine Matzke and Susanne Muhleisen.

Editions Rodopi

2006

337 pages

$91.00

Paperback

Internationale forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden literaturwissenschaft; v.102

PR830

Drawn from papers presented at the first conference of the Association for the Study of the New Languages in English in May 2004, this collection takes a cool and calm approach to the art of bloodcurdling. It explores the wide diversity of the thriller from classics of detective fiction to crime literature and all manner of writing on violence, disassociation and tension, focusing on settings and ideas emerging from and in postcolonial societies. Topics include the development of postcolonial identities through crime fiction, evidence of postcolonial postmortems in Ondaatje's Amil's Ghost, the disenchanted English detective in Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, Holmes in India and postcolonial transposition, Orientalist imagery in Massey's Rei Shimura novels, crime as transcultural device, fictional detectives at work in Botswana, the detectives of Ebersohn and politics, Schuyler's Manhattan postcolonial issues, Barret's rednecks, and Phillip's transcultural Sam Dean novels. The references are especially useful.

([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)