- Title
- Heads and tails: Apocope, decollation and detective fiction's inherent self-alterity
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Alterity Studies and World Literature Vol. 1, Issue 1, p. 1-15
- Publisher
- Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- This article explains and challenges the dominant tendency in detective fiction studies to privilege the end of the story, the detective’s great reveal and the presentation of one singular truth. Against this end-orientation is preferred a whole-text approach that gives fresh emphasis to the all too easily forgotten beginnings of so many stories whose detectives have taken all the limelight. Detective fiction will be shown to be a victim of its own success, a genre whose trappings have prevented it from being read as the literary text that it also, and nonetheless, is. A new reading of these beginnings will demonstrate how authors of detective fiction have, consciously or otherwise, used tropes and devices of beheading, in their beginnings, to counteract this tendency for the head to be removed in favour of the tail. The tale is not just a tail, and beheadings restore heads. And detective fiction is more than just the sum of its (grisly) parts.
- Subject
- Apocope; decollation; detective fiction; end orientation; reflexivity; self alterity; Julia Kristeva; Edgar Allan Poe
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1405354
- Identifier
- uon:35474
- Identifier
- ISSN:2209-2412
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
- Hits: 616
- Visitors: 614
- Downloads: 0
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format |
|---|