Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction

<p>This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to and nurtured by contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press.</p><p>The volume traces how police officers detectives criminals and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This in turn helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’ and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century. </p>