Dr. Federico 3 credits

ENG 302  Nineteenth-century crime fiction: murder, mystery, detection

Crime, mystery, madness, and detection fascinated nineteenth-century readers from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. The genre originated with the mass-appeal of criminal confessions in the Newgate Calendar and in a radical “thriller” about  guilt and transgression, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams  (1793).  Mad asylums and murderers, thieves’ dens and doubles became popular material for some of the great fiction writers of the nineteenth century, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sheridan LeFanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle. These authors exploited and refined a popular genre; they also dramatized how their society understood questions of law, sanity, sexuality, violence, and the dark places of human psychology. This course will look at developments in the genre of crime fiction from cultural, literary, and theoretical perspectives.

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