scholarly journals The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Alison Moulds
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Healthy Woman ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Woman Doctor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Detective ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Woman Movement

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

Cope, (Robert Knox) Jack (1913–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Hall
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
South African ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Guardian

‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent his early career as a local journalist in Durban before moving to London, England as a foreign political correspondent. As a pacifist, he met with hostility there during the years of World War II and returned demoralized to South Africa to work as a cultural critic and editor for an anti-apartheid newspaper, The Guardian, in Cape Town until 1955. After leaving the newspaper, he separated from his wife of sixteen years and began his infamous affair with South African poet Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s. During this time he also became the editor of Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine in English and Afrikaans, continuing as editor there for twenty years until 1980. During that time, he was also the editor of several volumes of South African poetry, and his book The Dawn Comes Twice (1969) was banned by the government. Best known for his novels and short stories, he wrote about the racial history of South Africa, focusing on events such as the Bambata Rebellion in 1906 in The Fair House (1955).

Detective Fiction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Humpherys
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moonstone

Much of 19th-century detective fiction was published in periodicals, the form of Victorian detective fiction being primarily the short story, though there were a handful of novels and novellas. The genre of detective fiction novels as it came down into the early 20th century was essentially established in the previous century. The standard history of Victorian detective fiction (in which a detective works to solve a specific crime or mystery) starts with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin stories (1841–1846), followed by the detectives of Charles Dickens (Bucket in Bleak House [1852–1853]) and Wilkie Collins (Cuff in The Moonstone [1868]) and culminating in the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. These texts and writers were for the most part the only ones subjected to early critical study. Sometimes early histories of detective ficton would briefly mention other English precursors to Sherlock Holmes, including William Godwin, Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams (1794) and the Newgate Calendar (1774); Thomas Gaspey, Richmond: Scenes from the Life of a Bow Street Runner (1827); or William Russell, Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer, by “Waters” (1856). Since the 1990s, however, following on the increased interest in popular culture and the recovery of texts by women writers, as well as the theoretical turn, especially structuralism, attention has increased in other writers of detective fiction, either earlier or contemporary with the Sherlock Holmes stories though many critical works still treat only the Sherlock Holmes. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the canon of detective fiction has expanded, criticism has done so as well by focusing on 19th-century detective fiction in terms of genre, science, and the empire.

scholarly journals The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Péter Hajdu
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Love Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Exclusive Focus

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

Weird History / Weird Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Chloé Germaine Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
Epistemological Uncertainty

The 2003 horror short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street partakes of the Weird tradition of revising the history of human civilisation whilst also producing a secret history of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The stories pit Conan Doyle’s master of rational enquiry against Lovecraft’s terrifying monsters. The contest is unsettling. Typically, detective fiction shores up faith in rational enquiry, whilst the Weird disrupts enlightenment narratives, suggesting that everything we know about the world is wrong. Shadows over Baker Street encourages the reader to surrender disbelief entirely in the face of the ‘ineluctability of the Weird.’ This surrender manifests a postmillennial structure of feeling towards epistemological uncertainty. Shadows over Baker Street is an example of how the Weird challenges rational, inductive reasoning and epistemological certainty, ushering in an era of belief - in the unbelievable.

Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
John S. Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Normal Function ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Brothers Karamazov

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

scholarly journals ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minna Vuohelainen
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Female Detective

This essay examines the adventures of Richard Marsh’s female detective and lip-reader Judith Lee (1911–16). The short-story series offers a powerful example of the cross-fertilisation of the genres of detective, Gothic, New-Woman and science fiction through Marsh’s ambivalent construction of his protagonist as a potentially progenerate being with seemingly supernatural communication skills. Lee is a liminal heroine who is simultaneously resistant to and complicit with the normalising taxonomies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class commonly associated with detective fiction. However, while the stories’ conformist position as scientifically minded crime fiction is complicated by their apparent tolerance of deviance, Lee’s expertise as a teacher of the deaf undermines counter-hegemonic readings because her profession aims to ‘cure’ a disability, deafness. Lee’s adventures show how popular fiction synthesised disparate discursive frameworks drawing on criminology, eugenics, science, communications technology and psychical research.

INTERVIEW WITH PETINA GAPPAH

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Faith Mkwesha
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Language ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Third ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Book Award ◽  
The University ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
University Of Zimbabwe

This interview was conducted on 16 May 2009 at Le Quartier Francais in Franschhoek, Cape Town, South Africa. Petina Gappah is the third generation of Zimbabwean writers writing from the diaspora. She was born in 1971 in Zambia, and grew up in Zimbabwe during the transitional moment from colonial Rhodesia to independence. She has law degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Graz. She writes in English and also draws on Shona, her first language. She has published a short story collection An Elegy for Easterly (2009), first novel The Book of Memory (2015), and another collection of short stories, Rotten Row (2016).  Gappah’s collection of short stories An Elegy for Easterly (2009) was awarded The Guardian First Book Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the richest prize for the short story form. Gappah was working on her novel The Book of Memory at the time of this interview.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

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