‘Knock it Off with the Mystical Horseshit:’ Detection in the American West

Dechêne, Antoine; Gregorio, Luca Di

doi:10.1080/14688417.2018.1431140

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…Likewise, in her study of Onsigbaar ( Blood Safari , 2009) by South African, Afrikaans‐language writer, Deon Meyer, Sam Naidu draws on the work of South African ecocritical scholars to argue for a critical practice that “is sensitive to the history of both human and environmental exploitation in this region,” meaning South Africa (60). More recent ecocritical approaches to crime fiction replicate the local paradigm by studying environmental issues in specific national and sub‐national regional contexts: Britain (K. Bishop; N. Bishop; Carroll; McLauchlan), Chile (Canepa), India (Paul), Mexico (Goldberg), Scandinavia (Mai), Sweden (Mäntymäki), and the diverse landscapes of the United States of America: California (Ashman), Florida (Horsley), Wyoming, and the Navajo Nation (Dechêne and Di Gregorio).…”

Section: Place and Environmental Crime Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

King¹

2021

The J of Popular Culture

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HE THEME OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION AND HUMAN-INDUCEDclimate change has become a staple of fiction and visual culture in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the seeming ubiquity of environmental and climate fiction-or cli-fi for short-has led Mads Rosendahl Thomsen to identify it as one of four prominent themes in contemporary world literature (98,. 1 To date, critical attention to this phenomenon has centered primarily on "'literary' and middle-brow" fiction (Trexler 7) as well as science fiction (Milner and Burgmann). Nevertheless, there is also a substantial corpus of crime novels from around the world that investigate and interrogate issues of environmental damage and ecological (in)justice. These novels have been identified variously as environmental crime fiction, "nature-oriented mystery novels" (Murphy 143), "eco-thrillers" (McKie), "econoir" (K. Bishop 9), "ecologically conscious detective fiction" (Bandyopadhyay 70), and "ecological crime fiction" (Walton 115).These works of environmental, etc., crime fiction have not gone unnoticed by ecocritical scholars or by crime fiction scholars who employ ecocritical approaches to these novels. At its most basic, ecocriticism combines literary, film, and art analysis with environmental studies in order to better comprehend the ways in which the imaginative arts facilitate or, indeed, hinder interspecies connections (Buell et al. 418). Ecocritical approaches range from the study of representations of nature, understood as both wilderness and built environments (Buell, Future 22), to exploring expressions of environmental concerns (land degradation, pollution, species extinction, etc.) and,

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Section: Place and Environmental Crime Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

King¹

2021

The J of Popular Culture

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Detective Storyworlds:Longmire,True Detective, andLa trêve

Dechêne

2020

Crime Fiction Studies

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This paper addresses one question: What makes detective series popular today? In the past, scholars have responded that the genre is mainly focused on plot, to the point of becoming a narrative prototype. This approach explains why detective fiction appears to be more limited in its proliferation across media than other genres such as fantasy or science fiction. If plot is the dominant feature of the genre, and plot somehow works against proliferation, then why are we still producing and consuming so many detective series? Following Marie-Laure Ryan, I wish to argue that a shift from plot to worldbuilding has occurred in detective fiction. This shift follows the evolution of narrative theory which in the last decades had to expand to other disciplines and media. In the same way that narratology embraced the new concept of ‘world,’ popular series have adopted its potential to proliferate, an aptitude that is now truly part of its aesthetics and poetics. I want to describe and understand the increasingly important role played by storyworlds in detective fiction so as to better apprehend how popular series are made in our cultural era of mass media production.

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‘Knock it Off with the Mystical Horseshit:’ Detection in the American West

Cited by 2 publications

References 8 publications

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

Detective Storyworlds:Longmire,True Detective, andLa trêve

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