From the Sublime to City Crime ed. by Maurizio Ascari, Stephen Knight

Abstract

Maurizio Ascari, and Stephen Knight, eds. From Sublime to City Crime. Monaco: LiberFaber, 2015. Pp. 297. 20 [euro]. From Sublime to City Crime comprises twelve essays--not including editors' co-authored introduction--covering a period in development of British, American, and European crime fiction that snugly overlaps what we conventionally style period of international Romanticism. Several of these were originally published in a thematic issue of Italian journal La Questione Romantica, co-edited by Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight under title Crime and Sublime. Among British writers, volume ranges from William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft through Thomas De Quincey and James Hogg to G. M. W. Reynolds, author of sprawling serialized novel The Mysteries of London, whose first weekly number appeared in October 1844. Their American cohort is represented by Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe, while Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, and a handful of pioneering Scandinavians draw our attention to continental developments. The editorial intention ostensibly embracing all of these essays, aside from their shared generic and historical focus, is to reveal gradual precipitation of what came to be called a subgenre of crime fiction epitomized by whodunnit and traditionally distinguished by its foregrounding of investigator's (inevitably successful) problem-solving abilities, out of a vigorous but more heterogeneous category of popular fiction founded on compelling--i.e., sublime--power of sheer mystery and terror of crime itself. The ideological underpinnings of this literary-historical understanding are not, in themselves, new, and can be traced back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish and its critical progeny, like D. A. Miller's The Novel and Police. In words of editors Ascari and Knight, Out of disciplinary procedures came a hero. He, at times she, resolved threats through skill, application, and occasionally courage.... Fulfilling ideological destiny of classic bourgeois fiction ... detective knotted loose ends of individualistic anxiety for isolated cerebral workers of late capitalism (9-10). What Ascari and Knight add to this by-now standard account of detection's disciplinary impact is an eye for persistence of as the underground river of later detective fiction that despite--or, perhaps more accurately, because of--its repression by Enlightened forces of rational investigation enduringly remains dynamo of excitement and anxiety that both drives narrative of crime and insistently demands its euphemisations (10). That, at least, is announced thesis of this collection, and while it is not, for various reasons, consistently realized by contributions that follow, it does provide a useful vade mecum. The contributions themselves--by scholars spanning globe from Slovakia to Canada and Italy to Australia--are uneven in rigor as well as depth, but all provide useful entrees for Romanticists looking to engage with ever-growing body of criticism on crime fiction and its governing poetics. The essays are arranged in roughly chronological order from 1790s to 1840s, moving at same time from Anglophone trans-Atlantic sphere to continent and back at last to England. Among those scholars familiar to British Romanticists, Maurice Hindle, editor of Penguin's groundbreaking 1988 edition of Caleb Williams, kicks things off with a close examination of Godwin's debts to Edmund Burke's Sublime and Gothic tradition, setting loose parameters for discussing these topics in essays that follow. Here sublimity under investigation is almost invariably of Burkean variety, linked to terror and largely interchangeable with the Gothic. The contributors following Hindle include Alessandra Calanchi on Brockden Brown's aural sublime, Ascari examining element of power (104) that co-inhabits De Quincey's writings on murder and his Gothic revenge fiction, Struan Sinclair on Poe's superperceivers, Giacomo Mannironi on Balzac's debts to British Romanticism, Heather Worthington on Blackwood's fictions of physician/lawyer Samuel Warren, and Anna Kay on mid-century popular reception and sublime interpretation of real-life murderess Maria Manning. …