Detecting Detection

Deborah Shaller is Professor in the English Department at Towson University, Baltimore, USA. She directs the university's writing tutorial service, and lectures on popular literature, writing, and educational theory. Peter Baker is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Towson University, Baltimore, USA.He is the author of three books, including Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn (University Press of Florida, 1995). He has also edited three volumes, including Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Peter Lang, 1996).With co-editors Rod Smith and Kaplan Harris, he is completing an edition of The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, forthcoming in Fall 2011 with the University of California Press.

"Having long ago outgrown the confines of the English country house murder mystery, the detective has travelled widely, adapting himself to other cultures and genres.  Contemporary critics have become increasingly fascinated by this versatility and by the diversity of detection itself.  The nine excellent essays in Detecting Detection astutely consider the reasons for the detection plot's persistence and proliferation, exploring in detail the ways in which it has been transformed across cultures and incorporated in a variety of other narrative forms. They illuminate its ability to raise difficult questions about moral and ethical choices, guilt, political repression, personal and national trauma, witnessing, judgment and belief - and about 'the elements of the global mystery of the functioning of the world and society'." -- Lee Horsley, Reader in Literature and Culture, Lancaster University, UK

• Introduction; 1. Of Crows and Humans as Witnesses: The Detection Plot as a Means of Testimony; Heta Pyrhonen; 2. The Savage Detectives: A Detective Story?; Peter Baker; 3. Spanish Detective Fiction: The Intertexual Cultural Life of a Narrative; Ana-Maria Medina; 4. Criminal Accessories and Civil Rights: The Politics of Detection in A Confederacy of Dunces; Michelle Robinson; 5. There Is Something In Between: Detection, Duplicity, and Terrorism in The Quiet American by Graham Greene; Sofia Ahlberg; 6. The Stories We All Tell; Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis; 7. Zen Master Detectives or Yellowface Puppets: Clown Charlie, Morph Moto, and Judging Dee; Sheng-Mei Ma; 8. St. Paul, Plato, and the Detective Story; Kim Toft Hansen; 9. African Initiation Narratives and Elements of the Modern Detective Novel; Amadou Kone; Bibliography; Index.