Staging Detection

<p><em>Staging Detection</em> reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays <i>Staging Detection </i>foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period from popular melodrama to society comedy.</p><p>Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor’s blockbuster play <i>The Ticket-of-Leave Man</i> the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights novelists critics and actors from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde <i>Staging Detection</i> sheds new light on Victorian acting styles furthers our understanding of melodrama and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture <i>Staging Detection</i> shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud omniscience and earned authority.</p><p>This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history Victorian literature and popular culture – as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.</p>