Popular Culture and Acquisitions by Linda S Katz

Author:Linda S Katz [Katz, Linda S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781560242994
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1993-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

PARALLELS BETWEEN THE NOVEL AND THE DETECTIVE GENRE

Parallels between the development of the novel and the development of the detective genre are striking. The novel form first appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, the detective genre one hundred years later. Both gained popular acceptance long before they achieved critical acclaim and scholarly attention. Initially, both forms were considered sub-literary, and reading them, a waste of time and intellectual ability. The dawning of respectability occurred approximately a century and a half after each of the forms first appeared.

Critics used similar analogies in condemning readers of both novels and mysteries. In 1932, almost two hundred years after the advent of the novel, Q. D. Leavis asserted that “the reading habit is now often a form of the drug habit,” in part because “the proportion of fiction to nonfiction borrowed [from libraries] is overwhelmingly great.”9 Edmund Wilson wrote in 1941 of detective fiction reading as “a kind of vice.” He compared the reader of such fiction to an alcoholic and an opium addict.10 W. H. Auden also used this imagery in “confessing” in 1948 that “[f]or me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.”11

Because scholars deemed these forms unworthy of serious study, the analyses of them were left to their creators. In 1954, Walter Allen wrote that “until quite recently, the only men who have taken the novel seriously have been novelists, and, often relatively uneducated men, they have frequently brought little to the study of it but their own experience as novelists, novelists, moreover, who interpreted their craft in no very exalted way.”12 Compare these remarks with those of Robin Winks about detective novel criticism: “The body of critical literature thus depends more than is good for the genre upon amateurs…. Good work … comes from those who, as practitioners of the craft, seek to analyze what it is that they do … . This lively, if academically unestablished, body of analysis does not generally qualify as literary criticism, and such writers as [Julian] Symons are consigned to the back of the book in the same manner as the literature they examine.”13

Historians of both genres first attempted to assign a lofty pedigree to each. According to Walter Allen, “literary historians, horrified it seems by the newness of the form, have commonly thought it necessary to provide the novel with a respectable antiquity, much as the genealogist fits out the parvenu with an impeccable family tree.”14 Historians of the mystery likewise look back to early literature for detective-genre elements. They cite the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel or the Apocryphal stories of “Bel and the Dragon” and “Susanna” in attempts to impose respectability on what many consider a bastard form. The geneses of both the novel and the detective genre, however, are much more recent.

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