Detective Story Research Articles

PSA Honorary Member: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and creative writer who has contributed significantly to Poe studies worldwide through her presentations, publications, and service to the Poe Studies Association over the course of her productive career. Beth’s research and teaching interests are wide ranging—including detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, feminist narratology, local writing, and poetry.Beth first studied Poe in the context of postmodernist “metaphysical” detective stories. Most of her work on detective fiction, including even an essay on Barbara Wilson’s lesbian detective novel Gaudi Afternoon, and some of her work on Nabokov (another major area of study) incorporate Poe. At some point, after chairing a session at the first international Poe conference and beginning to offer a regular seminar on “Poe’s Haunted World,” Beth became utterly absorbed in his work beyond the detective genre. Her training at Mount Holyoke and Brown University is mostly in twentieth-century American and European literature, but delving into Poe involved immersing herself in his world, so she found herself exploring nineteenth-century phenomena such as natural science, artificial light, optical devices, early photography, public speaking, and ventriloquism as contexts for his work. Coming to Poe “in a backwards fashion,” as she recounted in a Zoom seminar last year, allowed her to be playful and experimental, which resulted in her writing a screenplay based on his courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman and sculpting books out of clay representing the experiences of reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat.” As she wrote to me about her feelings toward the PSA, “I was welcomed by the PSA, and I have met wonderful friends and colleagues” while serving in various leadership roles and participating in many of the PSA’s activities over the years.In addition to the recognition she has received from the PSA for her outstanding research (the Gargano Award for an essay on Poe published in 2018 and in 2020 for a chapter published in a volume that won the Dameron Award), she has contributed significantly to our association by serving as PSA vice president, president, and immediate past president (2007–13), an editorial board member of the Edgar Allan Poe Review, and a member of three international conference program committees, the Gargano and Dameron Award committees, and, most recently, chair of the PSA nominating committee (on which she had served previously as a member). Beyond the PSA, Beth has volunteered her time and expertise to judge the Saturday “Visiter” Awards at the 2022 Poe Fest International. Many of us recall and appreciate seeing or acting in her screenplay about Poe’s romance with Sarah Helen Whitman at the Positively Poe Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. These contributions, as well as her participation as a speaker and a chair at the PSA’s major conferences as well as at PSA-sponsored sessions at the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association, illustrate her longtime engagement with and advancement of Poe studies.For her important contributions to Poe studies and her advancement of the mission of our organization, the Poe Studies Association recognizes Susan Elizabeth Sweeney with PSA honorary membership, which includes lifetime dues, a commemorative plaque, and the well-earned admiration of her peers. I look forward to the opportunity to present this award to Beth, if possible, at the 2023 ALA Convention in Boston.

Genre Strategies of a Historical Novel and a Detective Story in Abir Mukherjee's Work "A Man with a Great Future"

The purpose of this study is to analyze genre strategies in modern British multicultural literature on the example of A. Mukherjee's novel "A Man with a Great Future". The subject of the study is the genre dominants of the detective and historical novel in the work of A. Mukherjee, in particular elements of the classic English detective literature, as well as detective novels by Scottish writers of the XX century, who paid considerable attention to social issues in their works. The relevance of the article is determined by the relevance in modern humanities of scientific works devoted to the study of genres and genre models, including their transformation in modern world literature. The novelty of the work is determined by the low degree of study of A. Mukherjee's works, mainly from the point of view of genre specificity in the context of the expression of multicultural features of the text under consideration. The main research methods are biographical, comparative-historical and typological. As a result of the analysis, it is concluded that A. Mukherjee refers to the structure of the classical model of both the detective and historical novel, but adds a social and national context to the traditional genre dominants. The strategies of the detective and historical novel allow the author to reflect the patterns of historical determinism that determined the development of modern Britain and India, as well as to identify the origins of British multiculturalism, of which A. Mukherjee himself is a part.

„Університетський роман” (Campus novel / University Fiction): ґенеза та актуальні параметри жанру

The theoretical paradigm of the genre in the aspect of genesis is considered on the example of the genre variety of the novel, which today is identified as the university novel (campus novel, university fiction). The matrix genre-creating features of the university novel are singled out: problematics, specifics of the plot and personosphere, time-space, ironic narrative, author’s idiostyle. The internal species formations of the campus novel genre are determined by the specific issues and genre specifics of the plot organization – the youth environment, the professor-teaching component of the personosphere, as well as detective, fantastic, etc. the nature of the intrigue. Under the influence of the stylistic practice of a specific direction (for example, realism or postmodernism), the university novel demonstrates the so-called genre metamorphism. The genesis of the genre is traced in the context of its form-content national specificity. On the example of modern campus novels by Ph. Roth “The Human Mark”, Z. Smith “About Beauty”, J. Aldecoa “The Riddle”, A. Orehudo “A moment of rest”, V. Shostak “One Hundred Days Without a Sun”, V. Kalyta “Arkharotsi”, Halyna Babych “Tyuti” and “Professor Shumeiko”, D. Berezina “Faculty” it is concluded that it is the plot that generates and preserves the genre potential of the university novel. The prospects for the functioning of this genre are indicated the appearance of its new fantastic and detective story versions, derived from the total impact of the latest technologies on society (the emergence of new diseases and adaptation to them, the threat of environmental disasters, etc.). Attention is focused on the distinct cultural transgression of the thematic multivariate genre core of the campus novel into such modern art forms as manga, comics, and movies. Taking into account the concept of the genre spiral of N. Kopystyanska, a conclusion is made regarding the genetic evolution of the student novel. Terminologically concretized as an independent genre in the age of postmodernism, this genre is distinguished by the author’s idiostyle and raises social and political problems of a certain country, without losing the established features of the novel. The direct impact of metamodernism on the university novel is predicted, which will generate its deformation and a new cultural format based on the genre-creating potential of the topic.

Edogawa Rampo and Edgar Allan Poe

Taro Hirai (1894-1965), a Poe enthusiast who appeared as a detective in the late Taisho era with "The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (Shin Seinen, 1923.4) and took the pen name "Edogawa Rampo" after Edgar Allan Poe, first discovered Poe in the fall of 1914. It was a year after the outbreak of the First World War. At the time, Rampo was a second-year student (21 years old) in the Department of Political Science and Economics in the Faculty of Waseda University. He was busy with his professional studies and had little time for general education, but he still found time to read literary books in his spare time. During this period, Rampo wrote in his "Chronological Table" that he "read Poe and Doyle for the first time and discovered the delights of short detective stories. " His discovery of Poe and Conan Doyle was a milestone in Rampo's reading career, and he was "first fascinated by Poe, and three or four years later, I was astonished to come across Dostoevsky. ".

On Verbal Construction Frequency in Certain Genres of Popular Literature

Corpora-based language studies is a widespread practice in modern linguistics. In our study, we address so-called mass literature (or paraliterature) via a corpus of texts. The standardization of mass literature allows us to describe its genres by applying literary formulas. In brief, a formula serves for the embodiment of cultural themes and stereotypes in a universal form. While mass literature is a common subject of literary and cultural studies, from a linguistic point of view, literary formulas have not been studied well enough. We suggest that differences between the microgenres of paraliterature may be in syntax as well as in the vocabulary. Our work is based on the mass literature corpora and provides analysis of verb constructions characteristic of microgenres (love story, detective story, science fiction novel, and fantasy). In order to identify the distinctive features of mass literature microgenres, we have conducted a series of machine learning experiments. As a dataset, we compiled a corpus of 1,200 texts belonging to four microgenres. In our previous studies we showed that statistical features (text length, sentence length, and parts of speech frequencies) were insufficient for successful classification. The usage of lexical features has improved the quality of machine learning, however, the classifier based on syntactic features has shown the best results. 81 constructions have been selected as the most important features of syntactic-based machine learning. A verb construction consists of a “verb + dependencies”. We consider several types of dependencies: arguments (subject, direct and indirect objects) and adjuncts (subordinate clause and adverbial classifier). The constructions are described in terms of the fullness of the verb valencies. Several types of constructions are distinguished: complete, incomplete (with omissions of direct or indirect complements), and extended (with adjuncts). Specific examples of verb constructions in each of the microgenres have been analyzed and described. Based on the similarity of the construction profile, romance novels and detective stories show the predominance of verbs and direct speech constructions, whereas science fiction novels and fantasy demonstrate the prevalence of full constructions. Possible non-textual explanations for our observations are also provided. The method proposed in the study can be used for the investigation of various kinds of syntactic features, for instance, those associated with the author’s, temporal or genre specificities.

FICTIONALITY AND INTROSPECTION: TO THE POETICS OF DETECTIVE TEXT

A. Christie set a goal for herself: to create an ideal detective story that cannot be solved. However, she unsuccessfully combined two genres: a detective story, which is based on functionality, and a psychological novel, in which introspection plays an important role. As a result, both genres disintegrate, and the reader can unravel the mystery of the detective already at the beginning of the novel.

Kryminały (są) dla dziewczyn… — refleksje wokół cyklu detektywistycznego Karen Karbo o Minervie Clark

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in detective literature among the youngest readers. The appeal of this type of literature is confirmed not only by a kind of “publication overproduction” observable in the segment of books for children and young adults, but also by reader rankings. The latter also show two significant trends: firstly — the declining age of the youngest readers who choose detective stories, secondly — girls are beginning to prevail among the young recipients of this literature.
 The goal of the article is to seek an answer to the question why young girls increasingly often choose detective literature and what makes it attractive from the reception perspective. The example which is the focus of attention is the mystery-type trilogy written by American author Karen Karbo about the adventures of an eccentric teenager Minerva Clark. The series consists of the following volumes: Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs, and Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, all of which can be categorized as classical detective stories.
 The latest detective fiction for young girls, which readily utilizes gender and feminist topics, features more and more characters of brave and independent female amateur detectives. Minerva Clark has joined this colorful gallery of characters, who appeared in the twentieth-century literature thanks to Miss Marple novels authored by Agatha Christie. The literary character of Minerva Clark arouses associations with another fictional character meant for female teenage readers — Nancy Drew, the titular hero of American novels Nancy Drew Mystery Series, published in the USA since the 1930s.
 Minerva Clark has become part of the contemporary discourse on femininity and the role of gender in popular culture. The popularity of the trilogy in question as well as the whole trend of detective stories for girls can be explained in several ways. Apart from the feminine topic repertoire, the literary factors are of significance: suspense-keeping stories, captivating plots, young people’s slang, and most of all — humor, highly thought of by the young audience. In Karen Karbo’s series we are dealing with verbal-intellectual and situational comedy as well as that of characters. The content-related comedy-making factors in the trilogy about Minerva Clark also include humorous narration (play on words), situational scenes, and a happy ending. Books about female teenage detectives such as Minerva evoke a substantial response among their gender also because they are written with present-day girls and their needs in mind.

Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation as Autopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu

The article examines how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981 ), analyzing the game's potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era. Genre is understood in the response aesthetic sense, as collections of traits sedimented from authors' and designers' attempts to meet their audiences. Similar to how software can be engineered to replace older hardware, Call of Cthulhu replaces the genre functions underpinning Lovecraftian stories. Previous research discusses Call of Cthulhu as a horror RPG, mostly referencing later editions. This article's analysis, based on systems theory, deals with the first edition and a more complex genre composition. Emulation is described as autopoiesis-a generative mechanism of simultaneous autonomy and dependency vis-a-vis an environment. The role-playing system selects genre elements through structural couplings to its surroundings, and then recombines them in a new way, giving them new affordances.
 The result shows the ways in which the first edition of Call of Cthulhu fuses elements from the fantasy role-playing genre with elements from literary horror, detective story, pulp fiction and colonial mystery. The three most prominent characteristics of the game-the characters' mental health, the manner in which they confront Mythos representatives, and their expeditions to remote locations-are solutions to genre tensions, rather than properties of horror. Following the sociohistorical framing of the elements involved, the composite emulation allowed for the processing of perceived threats to the American way oflife during the early Reagan Era. The game offered a colonial fantasy, where real but more diffuse menaces, such as the nuclear arms race of the Cold War or the Iranian Revolution and ensuing energy crisis, could be fictionalized and reconsidered from the perspective of a predominantly white Christian struggle against evil in a 1920s world.

일본 근대 탐정소설을 둘러싼 과학적 상상력 ー 유메노 규사쿠(夢野久作)의 변격 탐정소설을 중심으로 -

This study examines the relationship between modern Japanese detective novels (especially “altered detective stories”) and science focusing on the works by Yumeno Kyusaku. Modern scientific knowledge is used in various forms in many detective stories regardless of whether they were “authentic” or “altered”. “Authentic detective novels” depict logical science based on solving cases while “altered detective novels” are more intended to portray scientific imagination in stories, because “altered detective novels” are more suitable to show such imaginations as they don’t follow the typical detective story structure. The protagonist of Yumeno Kyusaku's Ghosts and Propulsion (幽霊と推進機) rationally concludes ‘ghosts' as phantoms or illusions caused by anxiety based on his psychopathological knowledge, while the captain of The Wrecked Ship and a Boy (難船小僧) who denied superstition, experienced a mysterious event and believed in incomprehensible beings, showing the very opposite ending. In Human Egg (人間の卵) and Artificial Human (人造人間) which deal with similar subjects and the time, Yumeno uses the latest science such as an artificial womb through Egg (卵) which depicts the futuristic imagination of an artificial human. While introducing a technological discourse, these novels also portray the mystery of the supernatural. This shows the academic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that tried to solve all phenomena scientifically, and at the same time reveals that people who still have superstitions about transcendental existence coexisted. Yumeno tried to portray an era in which modern wisdom and pre-modern superstition collide, by utilizing incomprehensible phenomena to raise an alarm on the blind faith in science. The format of the altered detective novel, which was relatively free from scientific logic, provides a valid arena where the fantasy world and the mystery of science could be exquisitely harmonized.

Mediating Girl Power: A Cognitive Approach to Enola Holmes on Page and Screen.

Children’s mystery and detective fiction has often reflected cultural and societal changes, introducing the concept of “girl power” as early as the first half of the twentieth century. This article compares the “girl sleuth” narrative in Nancy Springer’s The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006) and the “super-sleuth” schema in the film adaptation Enola Holmes (2020). Relying on cognitive criticism, the analysis focuses on the conceptual properties of mystery and detective narratives as well as the strategies of detection employed by the girl sleuth to distinguish between the synchronous/inclusive models of empowerment found in children’s mysteries and the transient/exclusive ones in super-sleuth action-adventure adaptations. As a modern retelling of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the Enola Holmes story transforms the central schema in the great detective script by depicting the neo-Victorian girl sleuth’s transgression into the public sphere and the attainment of the feminine ideal of girl power. However, in popular media culture, the synchronous models of empowerment are often replaced by transient models, which are characterized by hyper-transgressions, the objectification of knowledge and cognition, and the affective engagement of viewers. Accordingly, the super-sleuth schema is the product of media discourses of empowerment and hyper-textual practices that often forgo the integration of body, mind and context found in mystery and detective stories. By embodying the contemporary treatment of knowledge and power as ephemerally shared commodities, the super-sleuth does not let the viewer into the game to the same degree as the girl sleuth does, providing a less empowering experience for its intended audience.

Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story by Lydia Goehr

Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story by Lydia Goehr

THE FORMULA OF AGATHA CHRISTIE’S DETECTIVE STORY THE THIRD-FLOOR FLAT

Abstract
 This research aims to explain the detective formula as portrayed in Agatha Christie’s The Third-Floor Flat short story and the techniques that are employed to maintain the suspense by using Cawelti’s formula theory. Cawelti explains there are four aspects of the classic detective’s formula: situation, the pattern of action, character and their relation, and setting. This research is descriptive qualitative research. The formulas of detective stories exist in The Third-Floor Flat. The plot goes straight on the definite formula: the preliminaries, birth of the plot, intentional misleading, the crime, grouping for the murderer by the police, friends, relatives, and amateur detective, failure of everybody, detective’s announcement of facts and proof. The author used some techniques such as the whodunit, metaphor, foreshadowing, and fake devices to maintain the suspense.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

Reviewed by: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch Anton Borst (bio) John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021. In John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, Poe’s famous horror tales like “The Fall of the House of Usher” form but one phase of a rich literary career, rather than its apogee. That honor falls to a text typically overlooked by the general reader: Eureka, Poe’s sprawling, strange, and—as Tresch shows—scientifically informed attempt to explain nothing short of everything. In its opening pages, Poe himself promises “to take such a survey of the Universe that the mind may be able really to receive and to perceive an individual impression,” a palpable sense, presumably, of the contrary forces Poe believed were responsible for all existence: attraction and repulsion. Combining powerful flights of poetic intuition with current scientific ideas, Eureka, writes Tresch, was “a mess: a serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess” (p. 305), but was nevertheless viewed by Poe as “the culmination of his writings, his dreams, and his ill-starred life” (p. 8)—and indeed, it appeared the year before Poe’s death. It thus serves Tresch as the guiding telos for telling the story of the writer’s troubled life. While retreading familiar biographical ground (Poe’s fraught relationship with foster father John Allan, his bouts with poverty and drunkenness, his success with “The Raven”), Tresch places new emphasis on Poe’s persistent interest in science, while sketching out the broader scientific milieu Poe inevitably absorbed as a culturally engaged nineteenth-century urbanite (the itinerant Poe lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York). In his late teens and early twenties, Poe trained and served in the military, first in the US Army before enrolling at West Point, where he excelled in the highly regulated curriculum of mathematics and science. Tresch suggests the roots of Poe’s understanding of literary composition as an engineer and artificer, rather than inspired Romantic lyricist, lie here. After turning from his officer training to pursue a literary career in magazines, Poe writes about enough science publications and discoveries to be considered “one of America’s first science reporters” (p. 132). Tresch, however, seems less interested in specific scientific ideas than how broader questions of a cultural, epistemological, and cosmological nature influenced Poe’s work—questions largely defined by the emergent, unregulated status of science in antebellum America. During Poe’s life, science was moving uncertainly from the amateur gentlemen’s clubs of the 1700s [End Page 495] to what would become the self-regulating, officially sanctioned institutions of today. What made the move uncertain, of course, were the currents of Barnumesque sensationalism and quackery coursing through popular culture, which sometimes exploited the trappings of science to lend credibility to spectacles and sideshows. Scientists like Joseph Henry and Alexander Dallas Bache—who lived in Philadelphia during the same time as Poe, Tresch notes—railed against the “humbug” they saw threatening scientific authority and labored to set up national institutions exclusive to professional scientists, cut off from the public and its demands for sensation. At several points, Tresch interrupts his story of Poe to describe Henry and Bache’s efforts, which led to the establishment of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Smithsonian Institution. What does this have to do with Poe? Tresch argues that what Poe himself called the “science” of criticism he applied, on objective and rational grounds, to the similar end of enforcing literary standards to establish a national literary culture (p. 161). Tresch also teases out themes of scientific method and observation in stories like “A Descent into the Maelstrom” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as well as in Poe’s detective stories featuring Dupin, who demonstratively utilizes logic and method to solve his first mystery, and probabilistic reasoning in his second. The biographical format of the book strains at such points: the readings of individual texts might...

Literary allusions in detective novels by Agatha Christie

The author analyzes literary allusions in detective novels by Agatha Christie. For the first time, allusions to the works of W. Shakespeare, C. Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton are considered in detail. Many allusions are established for the first time. As a material for writing this article, a large number of novels were used, among which there are also rarely considered texts of the English writer. The meaning of allusions to "Twelfth Night" in the novel "The Sad Cypress" is revealed in detail, to the works of Wodehouse – in the novel "Why not Evans?" In the article, in the context of the studied problem, the features of escapism of the detective genre are considered. Based on the consideration of examples from a number of novels by Agatha Christie, conclusions are drawn about the significance of literary allusions in her novels in general and in specific works in particular. Allusions expand the semantic field of novels, allow Agatha Christie to go beyond the detective story, limited by the principles of formulaic literature, to consider psychological problems, to portray ambiguous characters in the spirit of classical English literature. At the same time, with the help of a significant number of allusions emphasized by the author, the literary nature of what is happening in detective novels is brought to the fore, which largely corresponds to the escapist nature of this genre.

THE CATEGORY OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN A CONTEMPORARY DETECTIVE NOVEL (BASED ON THE NOVEL “TROUBLED BLOOD” BY R. GALBRAITH)

New forms of intertextuality are constantly being discovered in fiction, which requires a common methodological basis for its analysis. A brief overview of English-language detective stories shows that intertextuality in this genre can be realized in different forms and perform various functions. The leading research method of the study is interpretive analysis of the links between the quoting and quoted texts. A great number of quotations used as epigraphs to the novel “Troubled Blood” by R. Galbraith, gives grounds to assert that the book contains two texts, which inevitably makes the reader compare them, identify analogies, similarities and differences. The analysis of interaction of the texts that are different in time, themes and genres but are united in one artistic whole plays a significant role in interpreting R. Galbraith’s novel, understanding its characters, themes, plot lines, solving the novel’s intrigue. Comparing epigraphs and corresponding chapters of the novel gives grounds to conclude that there are two variants of their correlation - correspondence at the level of the content and contrast at the level of the form. Intertextuality of the novel under study demonstrates synthesis of genres, functional styles, ideological and imaginative standards, which becomes the basis for the work’s structure, creates a dialogue of different eras, cultures, literary traditions.

Lafcadio Hearn: Between Literature and Journalism

The article is devoted to the early period of the work of the Anglo-American writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). It mainly includes American articles in periodicals. The topic is poorly studied in the domestic research field, as well as Hearn’s works in general, which leads to scientific novelty. The study was carried out with the help of intertextual and motive analysis of newspaper articles in identifying common plots of the writer’s work and references to other authors. It is noted that although Hearn became famous thanks to his stories and legends collected in Japan, he was formed as a writer in America. The article examines the features of Hearn’s style as a journalist: author’s masks (detective, comical narrator, whistleblower), playful communications with the reader, the presence of Gothic elements, references to literary works of favorite authors, common vocabulary, and combination of real facts with fiction. Hearn’s role as a forerunner of whistle-blowing journalism and new journalism is noted, and a series of articles on the tannery murder are examined. There is a movement from sensational and shocking articles to more calm meditative observations, from external to internal. Journalistic experience, as the study showed, significantly influenced Hearn’s literary activity (brevity of form, mixing documentary and fiction, elements of a detective story, subjective position of the narrator).

The influence of Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction on Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s short-short stories

The short-short story was first introduced by Japanese writer Tsuzuki Michio, who in the late 1950s – the early 1960s familiarized the Japanese reader with extra-short stories of American author Fredric W. Brown (1906–1972); his traditions were followed by Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), Akagawa Jirō (b. 1948), and other authors experimenting in the new genre of social and psychological science fiction, as well as in the genre of fantasy and detective stories. In American literature, three major specific features of a short-short story were formulated: 1) a fresh idea, 2) an unexpected turn of events, 3) an unpredictable ending. These specific features can be traced in Japanese extra-short stories as well. Since the process of the emergence and development of the extra-short story as a new form of Japanese literature was influenced by American micro fiction, the research examines the elements borrowed from Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s first short-short stories; this includes genres, topics, canons, artistic styles and devices, as well as the treatment of certain social problems. The paper analyzes Hoshi’s and Akagawa’s short-short fiction from a comparative perspective, with an emphasis on intertextuality – shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, in this case, the texts by an American writer. Some literary parallels to Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction can be found in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s first collection of short-short stories «Bokko-chan» (1971), which consists of stories written in 1958–1970, as well as in Akagawa Jirō’s first collection of short-short stories «The Dancing Man» (1986), which consists of stories written in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The succession of plots and philosophical ideas by Brown is examined on the material of seven early short-shorts by Hoshi, where the allusion to the American writer’s micro fiction can be traced; in addition, it is also noted that, in some mystic extra-short stories by Akagawa, it is not the plots which are borrowed, but mostly artistic devices and various techniques, such as psychologism, black humor, wordplay, and metaphorical images. American origins of the Japanese short-short story are investigated for the first time.

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011

Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species

Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species

Who Didn’t Do It?

ABSTRACT David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a generic hybrid: literary journalism, true crime tale of the Wild West, and whodunit. I argue that the activation of different sets of reader expectations for these genres gives it an extraordinarily powerful political impact. Based on reviews and reader responses on Amazon and Goodreads and on the genre characteristics of the narrative itself, I make the case that Grann satisfies readers’ expectations for formula Westerns and classical detective stories in the first two parts (i.e., solving the crime and arresting the bad guy), only to undermine them in the final section, in which just about all the white citizens in the county emerge as complicit with the crimes. Further, Killers of the Flower Moon–like many true-crime stories–offers a feminist critique of the romance plot by unveiling how happily-ever-after marriages can turn violent and abusive for women.