AN0A504T - Sociophonétique & Littérature GB

The detective figure, as crystallized in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes at the end of the nineteenth century, has loomed large in British culture ever since. This enduring success might in part be explained by the rich web of literary influences that shaped detective fiction. This course aims at exploring the origins of the genre through the study of the early nineteenth-century detective novel of manners and the Victorian sensation novel. The first part of this course will focus on Jane Austen’s contribution to the rise of the detective figure in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815) and Northanger Abbey (1817). These novels of “mystery without murder”, as Ellen Belton has called them, are informed by typical eighteenth-century conventions (such as sensibility) whilst foregrounding observation and the clinical gaze, hence heralding methods of investigation later to be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective Auguste Dupin (1841-1844). The second part of this course will look at the Victorian sensation novel (as represented by such authors as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood), whose popularity soared in the 1860s, showing how the genre paved the way for late-Victorian detective fiction with plots inspired by contemporary crimes and amateur and professional detectives.

Travail à partir d’extraits de textes littéraires (brochure à télécharger sur IRIS, imprimer et apporter en cours). Lecture obligatoire de Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen) et The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins) avant le début du cours.

BELTON, Ellen R. “Mystery Without Murder: The Detective Plots of Jane Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.1 (Jun. 1988): 42-59.

FOUCAULT, Michel Foucault. Naissance de la clinique. Paris : PUF, 1963.

KAPLAN, Laurie. “What is Wrong with Marianne? Medicine and Disease in Jane Austen’s England.” Persuasions 12 (1990): 117-30.

MILLER, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.

MILTON, Heather. “Sensation and Detection.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela Gilbert. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 516-527.

SNELL, Robert. Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts: Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude. New York: Routledge, 2013.

THOMAS, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

TRECKER, Janice. “Wilkie Collins’s Sleuths and the Consolations of Detection.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 54.4 (2013): 337-351.

WILTSHIRE, John. Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.