- Title
- Getting under the skin to read the signs: the call of classical myths and mysteries in Leigh Redhead's 'Peepshow'
- Creator
- Johnson, Marguerite; Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Australian Journal of Crime Fiction Vol. 1, Issue 2
- Relation
- https://carolyn-beasley.squarespace.com/peepshow
- Publisher
- Australian Journal of Crime Fiction
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- While much of the debate as to the origins of crime fiction focuses on whether or not Edgar Allan Poe can be considered the first exponent of the genre, Sophocles’s Theban plays, and especially those in which Oedipus is cast as the eponymous detective-murderer, are also often singled out as a powerful Ur-text (Knight 2015).[1] In studies of analytic detective fiction, the critical school of choice for those interested in the study of Poe’s Dupin stories, Freudian and Lacanian psychology and twentieth-century theories of textual analysis intensify this focus on Oedipus’s tale (Irwin 1994; Bayard 1998).[2] Arguably always absent-present in crime fiction, as the unconscious other to the diegesis consciously recounted to the reader, the ancient world is too powerful a source (of stories and mythology) to be overlooked by the contemporary reader, author or scholar of crime fiction. It is precisely the interconnection of ancient myth and contemporary crime fiction that is the focus of this article. For its part, Classical Reception Studies has substantially challenged, subverted and (perhaps) partially demolished the once seemingly entrenched philological fetishes and class-bound exclusivity that have traditionally characterised the study of antiquity. From the tentative steps in the 1940s that paved the way to the Classical Tradition, to the embryonic forays into Classical Reception Studies in the 60s and 70s and its blossoming in the 80s and 90s, scholars engaged in this somewhat renegade (‘sub’)-discipline have pushed, and continue to challenge, the boundaries of what is acceptable areas of engagement with the ancient world.
- Subject
- myths; Leigh Redhead; Peepshow; crime fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1330763
- Identifier
- uon:26473
- Identifier
- ISSN:2205-9849
- Language
- eng
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