Description
It goes without saying that acts of violence (most frequently murder) lie at the heart of crime fiction of all national and historical varieties. Nevertheless, in many such works, this violence is sanitized and downplayed, perhaps out of a desire to pass the censor or not to alienate public taste. A similar tendency is visible in critical work on crime fiction, which concentrates on the play of the analytical in the genre and, in particular, the role of the detective. This paper will focus on works in which the violence is portrayed in realistic detail and discuss the impression created by such depictions. Looking back to the roots of the genre, the paper will briefly consider the combination of the Gothic, horror and the abject in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. It will then move on to consider works of Russian crime fiction from the late Imperial period, including N.P. Timofeev’s ‘Преступление суеверия’ (1872) and ‘Три жизни’ (1878), S.A. Panov’s ‘Помочь’ (1872) and A.E. Zarin’s В поисках убийцы (1902). The analysis will refer to Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection as well as various theories of the grotesque. Discussion of these works will consider the implications of the realistic portrayal of violence on the depiction of gender, religious belief and science in late Imperial-era crime fiction.| Period | 10 Nov 2017 |
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| Held at | Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, United States |
| Degree of Recognition | International |