Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity by Stephen Knight (review)

Abstract

1076 Reviews Although forthe more general reader it is perhaps the two concluding sections that will be of most interest, given their emphasis on aspects of Orientalist critique that continue to attract sustained interest, the opening sets ofessays are remarkable in their attention to a rich body of Persian art (the book is well illustrated, with twenty-seven striking plates) and Arabie literature (ranging from the poetry of Hafez to contempo? rary chanson), both of which often tend to be ignored in studies of Western-generated 'Orientalist discourse'. As such, Nadia Ali's consideration of European influences on the aesthetics of the nude, Eloise Brac de la Perriere's exploration of recurrent androgyny in Persian art, and Laurent Bury's study of the impact of Western erotic images on the representation of indigenous women in the Arab world all operate in a contrapuntal relationship to the later essays on Western travellers and novelists. Se? veral of these contributions addressing travel writing, gender, and Orientalism adopt an ethnographic approach to their subject matter,acknowledging their primary focus on aristocratic perceptions of elsewhere. Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain accordingly provides a useful contrast to these in her study of women tourists in later nineteenthcentury Egypt, drawing on unpublished diaries to recover often muted travel stories. It is the finalsection in particular that contains a number ofconceptually sophisticated pieces?such as JenniferYee on Myriam Harry and Pierre Loti's use of stereotypes, Ai'da Balvannanadhan on shifting understandings of purdah, and Rita El Khayat's Foucauldian engagement with the seraglio and despotism?with a potentially wider applicability to Orientalist debates. With contributions from scholars operating in a range of fields?principally arthis? tory,literarystudies, sociology?the volume is genuinely interdisciplinary, suggesting that the study of Orientalism stretches beyond Said's own primarily literary cor? pus. In a concise yet convincing preface, the editors manage the divergence between their contributors' various approaches, describing an 'approche pluri-disciplinaire et "pointilleuse"' (p. 8). The fragmentary structure and disparate corpus mean that the book remains a sum of its parts, but these parts are still a welcome intervention in the field of Orientalist scholarship and a reminder that, with such a profusion of images and refigurings of the 'Other', any attempt at reduction of representations of elsewhere to a single model?what the editors dub 'une enieme theorie orientaliste (p. 8)?is itself bound to be flawed. University of Liverpool Charles Forsdick Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. By Stephen Knight. Ba? singstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. xv + 272 pp. ?14.99. ISBN 0-333-79179-7. Students and scholars of modern crime fiction seeking a comprehensive map find in Stephen Knight's Crime Fiction 1800-2000 a double bonus. For the work does more than survey the growth and diversifying of crime fiction. It also closely matches the up-to-date scholarship with the relevant texts or period. So those seeking analysis of Sara Paretsky, for example, will also find directions to the published criticism amidst the lucid contextualizing of her importance. Knight's paradigm for understanding the development of the genres is contained in his explanatory subtitle. The period up to around 1920 sees the establishment of the detective as the legendary figure empowered to stave offthe threat of disorder . This stage is followed by the widespread concentration of crime into murder, as the one act metonymically able to stand for ultimate transgression. The period after the Second World War sees the advent of diversity, in responding to the increasing political complexity of the postcolonial, post-feminist West. Now in the twenty-first MLR, 100.4, 2005 1077 century, Knight advances an intriguing thesis that postmodern crime writing, with all its ambivalence about truth and justice, may have worked itself back to the condition of the pre-'great detective' eighteenth century. Prior to the rise of the trusted figure, popular stories could not pretend that the rough justice enacted always corresponded with truth. Perhaps the fate of crime fiction constitutes another point of resemblance between the Romantic and postmodern eras. Crime Fiction 1800-2000 offers a 'disciplinary' perspective on the nature of the work by using Foucault's notion ofthe emergence of internalized...