Mayhem and Murder : : Narative and Moral Issues in the Detective Story / / Heta Pyrhönen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Pyrhönen, Heta,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1999
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

The detective story centres on unravelling two questions: whodunit? and who is guilty? In Murder and Mayhem, Heta Pyrhönen examines how these questions organize and pattern the genre's formal and thematic structures. Beginning with a semiotic reading of the detective as both code-breaker and sign-reader, Pyrhönen's theoretical analysis then situates the reader and the detective in parallel worlds - both use the detective genre's typical motifs in solving the crime, but do not employ the same narrative interpretations to do so. This difference is examined with the help of the familiar game analogy: while the fictional world of the criminal functions as the detective's antagonist, readers see both the detective and the criminal as the fictional masks behind which their own adversary, the author, is hiding. The reading of detective stories as complex interpretative games reveals how the genre engages the reader's formal imagination and moral judgment.Discussing a range of detective stories from works by Conan Doyle and Chesterton to Borges and Rendell, and drawing on the work of major critics - including Dennis Porter, Umberto Eco, John T. Irwin, and Slavoj Žižek - Pyrhönen offers a unique, sophisticated, and engagingly lucid analysis of a complex genre.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction -- I: Investigating 'Whodunit' -- 1. Projecting the Criminal -- 2. Abduction: Interpreting Signs for Narrative Ends -- 3. Fitting the Solution to the Mystery -- II: Investigating Guilt -- 4. The Reading of Guilt -- 5. Putting Together an Ethical View of Life -- 6. The Anatomy of Good and Evil in Agatha Christie -- 7. Symbolic Exchanges with Death: Raymond Chandler -- Coming to an End -- NOTES -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX