scholarly journals Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Duncan Dicks
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
State Control ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
The Past ◽  
Crime Novel

Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation consists of two parts. The first section is the novel, Conexus, which is a practice-based exploration and illustration of crime fiction as state-of-the-nation social commentary. The second is a critical discussion of the requirements of a state-of-the-nation novel that reflects the contemporary, globalised word, and how crime fiction contends with these needs. Conexus follows a range of characters in parallel threads that converge onto a single physical location in Gloucestershire. Ainsley Griffin, a technology journalist, his partner, Chelsey, his grandson, Sundance, and a range of other characters gradually become aware of each other through their use of IT as they investigate a series of undiscovered murders that began with a sophisticated network of paedophiles in the 1990s. The murderer chooses each new victim through the random last act of communication of the last victim, and controls their lives through surveillance hacking before murdering them. The critical underpinning of the thesis discusses the concepts, theories and controversies surrounding the concept of a nation (for example, following the legacy of Gellner’s work, Hroch, and the explorations of Bhabha), emphasising the importance of state control through jurisprudence, of communication technology, and of physical locations and boundaries over the past two hundred years. The relative importance and impact of these concepts is seen to have changed dramatically with the rapid explosion of information technology in the twenty-first-century, requiring a very different approach to literary explorations of a nation. A number of crime novels from the past 25 years are analysed in conjunction with Conexus. The locations and boundaries are discussed with reference to the uncanny implications of the physical as discussed by Freud. Approaches to the incorporation of information technology into crime fiction are explored, and the success of this integration is compared to other literary works. In summary, the suitability of the crime novel as portrayal and summary of the culturally and socially significant trends of the time is assessed.

scholarly journals Bloody Women: How Female Authors Have Transformed the Scottish Contemporary Crime Fiction Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Lorna Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Abstract This study will explore the role of female authors in contemporary Scottish crime fiction. Over the past thirty years, women writers have overhauled the traditionally male dominated genre of crime fiction by writing about strong female characters who drive the plot and solve the crimes. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Lin Anderson are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender and genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, both journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series, I wish to explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives. This essay documents the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research which involves writing a crime novel set in a post referendum Scotland. I examine a progressive and contemporary Scottish society, where women hold many senior positions in public life, and investigate whether this has an effect on the outcome of crimes. Through this narrative, my main character will focus on the current and largely hidden crimes of human trafficking and domestic abuse. By doing this I examine the ways in which the modern crime novel has evolved to cross genre boundaries. In addition to focusing on a crime, the victims and witnesses, today’s crime novels are tackling social issues to reflect society’s changing attitudes and values.

David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Kaisidou
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Twenty First Century

Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market. This raises important questions as to why the burden of the civil conflict weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. This article begins by offering an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s. Then it uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to illustrate the authors’ ethical commitment to ‘unsilence’ and redress the past through the use of archival evidence and testimonies. The case studies of ThomasSkassis’Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000), Nikos Davvetas’ Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στορινγκ (2006),and SophiaNikolaidou's Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) serve to illustrate my argument.

Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 479-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise I. Shelley
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
State Control ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Social Responsibilities ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Political Economic

The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has shifted depending on the conditions of the state. The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.

Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State in Southeast Asia

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Day ◽  
Craig J. Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Knowledge Society ◽  
The State ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Cable Tv ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowledge Formation

It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and the State

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW PEPPER
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
The Us ◽  
A Site ◽  
Corporate State

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

The Short Story, the New Weird, and the Literary Market

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Raphael Zähringer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Literary Market

Abstract The short story is commonly – and very productively – treated in the spirit of critical terms such as marginality and liminality. Quite surprisingly, though, New Weird Fiction, which postulates similar interests in, e.g., formal and aesthetic innovation as well as literary ambition, is primarily associated with the novel. The underlying lack of interest in the New Weird Short Story in both popular culture and academic work is scrutinised in this article. In a first step, it will survey the short story as a liminal form, both formally and aesthetically, and contextualize it by drawing upon the state of the literary market in the twenty-first century. The contribution’s main argument is that the short story has always either been considered to be too ‘popular’ or too ‘literary’ in order to contest the novel as the prevalent literary form. Step two will perform a similar move regarding Weird Fiction, thus highlighting the parallels between the short and the Weird, and the need for more academic attention dedicated to the New Weird short story.

The Ivory Tower : The Cessation of Concern

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
Alan W. Bellringer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Late Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
The Way

Henry James's The Ivory Tower (1917) has suffered a similar fate to that of other incomplete last novels; most critical discussion has centred on the way it would have ended, taking into account resemblances with earlier works. This line of enquiry has not been very profitable; James's late style is too complex and rich to tempt anyone to continue The Ivory Tower in the way that ‘ Another Lady ’ has recently gone on with Sanditon. In any case one cannot legitimately say one wishes that James had lived to finish The Ivory Tower, since in fact he lived on without doing so; he had enough time to complete it if he had wanted. His general intentions were clear as we know from the ample notes he left. Why then did James give up? He stopped with the outbreak of the First World War, no doubt on the day war broke out. The really interesting critical question with regard to The Ivory Tower is: What is there in the novel, in its design as well as in its completed opening, which James found contradicted by war? James's imagination found the creative act of writing The Ivory Tower incompatible with war-time experience. He turned to other work, such as The Sense of the Past.

The Past and Future of Joycean Copyright

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Golden
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay chronicles how copyright has affected the publication of James Joyce's work, the scholarly and aesthetic use of Joyce's words, and how the legal regime has been used in criticism. It offers prognosticatory thoughts on the outcomes of recent technological developments and copyright changes: "new scholarship can quote more liberally and editions can present the novel in a fashion that speaks to the changing scope of Joyce scholarship in the twenty-first century." While research continues in the history of Joyce and copyright, this essay gives an overview of how this legal regime has inflected Joyce studies thus far.

Civil disobedience movements in Hong Kong: a civil society perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 312-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiu Chung Wong ◽  
Jason K.H. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Chief Executive ◽  
The State ◽  
State Control ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Society Perspective

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of civil disobedience (CD) movements in Hong Kong in the context of the notion of civil society (CS). Design/methodology/approach The paper begins by rigorously defining the notion of CD, as well as the concept of CS and tracing its development in Hong Kong over the past several decades. By using a model of CS typology, which combines the variables of state control and a society’s quest for autonomy (SQA), the paper aims to outline the historical development of CD movements in Hong Kong. It also discusses the recent evolution of CS and its relationship with CD movements, particularly focusing on their development since Leung Chun-ying became the Chief Executive in 2012. Finally, by using five cases of CD witnessed in the past several decades, the relationship between the development of CS and the emergence of CD in Hong Kong has been outlined. Findings Four implications can be concluded: first, CD cannot emerge when the state and society are isolated. Second, the level of SC and the scale of CD are positively related. Third, as an historical trend, the development of SQA is generally in linear progress; SQA starts from a low level (e.g. interest-based and welfare-based aims) and moves upwards to campaign for higher goals of civil and political autonomy. If the lower level of SQA is not satisfied, it can lead to larger scale CD in future. Fourth, the CD movement would be largest in scale when the state-society relationship confrontational and when major cleavages can be found within CS itself. Originality/value This paper serves to enrich knowledge in the fields of politics and sociology.

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