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Detecting Objects: The Material Item and Detective Fiction
University of Portsmouth UK,
June 12, 2014
Deadline: March 28, 2014
Keynote speaker: Dr Janice Allan, University of Salford
Pioneering works in the field of ‘thing theory’ such as Bill
Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003)
and Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the
Victorian Novel (2006) have sought to re-conceptualize the roles of objects
in fiction, moving beyond Marxist conceptions of the commodity and seeing
material items not as weak metonymies, but as tellers of obscured histories.
Yet the focus of such explorations has tended towards a focus on canonical
realism and the ways in which such texts invite us to concentrate on subjects
at the expense of objects. This symposium considers the ways in which objects
have always been of crucial importance to the popular genre of
detective fiction, as either clues, weapons, or as other embodiments of
history. We welcome proposals on any aspect of the reading of objects in
detective fiction (and related genres such as the sensation novel and crime
fiction) from the nineteenth century onwards.
Potential topics for proposals include (but are not limited
to):
- The material object as clue or detective
- The material object as weapon or victim
- Deconstructions of the animate/inanimate in detective fiction
- Detective fiction as material object: book and publication history
- Detective fiction and materialism
- The material manifestations of detective/crime fiction fan cultures
