Investigating the Canon: The Reader as Detective in Reworkings of Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a trend towards adapting, rewriting, or otherwise engaging with the literary canon—especially the nineteenth-century novel—via the popular genre of crime fiction may be observed in both French and English. Taking as its main examples Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel <em>The Eyre Affair</em> and Philippe Doumenc’s <em>Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary</em> (2009), this article considers what is special about crime-fiction engagements with the literary canon and how they differ from other types of adaptation, in particular in the use of the central detective figure as a proxy for the position of the reader. Crime fiction and its subgenres—here, the whodunit and hard-boiled thriller—is a transnational genre which readily adapts itself to local contexts. I argue that both Doumenc and Fforde adapt their chosen genres in order to explore the nature and purpose of their respective national canons. Following a detailed analysis of the role of the reader–detective in each text, the article goes on to demonstrate how both texts engage in theoretical debates on canonicity, including questions of authorial genius, aesthetic value, and the pleasure of reading. By emphasising the position of a skilled non-academic reader, familiar with the codes and conventions of both “high” literature and genre fiction, crime fiction reworkings offer a non-hierarchical approach to the literary canon, presented as part of a shared cultural property and, above all, a source of enjoyment. However, while they acknowledge aspects of literary theory and academic debate, their orientation towards a mass-market audience and the conventions of their genre may also lead them to side-step the overt political engagement of recent academic debates on the canon.