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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2021

        Sara Paretsky

        Detective fiction as trauma literature

        by Cynthia Hamilton

        Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky's work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts - whether they be personal, institutional, or national - that authorise 'forgetting' of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky's achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2008

        The family tree detective

        Tracing your ancestors in England and Wales

        by Colin Rogers

        The long-awaited fourth edition of this best-selling manual continues to offer up-to-date guidance both to newcomers and to the more experienced, on how to make best use of the labyrinth of genealogical sources in England and Wales. It takes into account recent, and even some future, changes to the civil registration system, and incorporates many of the vast sources newly available on the internet. There is also a substantial bibliography for those who discover that their ancestors migrated from other countries. New appendices provide research into underregistration of birth and death, and hitherto unpublished details from the 1915 and 1939 National Registers. The family tree detective remains an indispensible source of information on how to locate births, marriages and deaths, and alternative strategies if those searches fail. Dr Colin D. Rogers is a Fellow of the Society of Genealogists, a member of AGRA (the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives), and was for thirty years the Hon. General Editor of the Lancashire Parish Register Society. He runs a consultancy helping banks and solicitors to identify and locate beneficiaries. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Asia in Western fiction

        by Robin Winks

        Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        Missi Moppel - Detective for all Cases (2). The Floating Teapot and other Weird Wonders

        by Andreas H. Schmachtl

        The master detective is after a cunning thief who steals colourful, random objects like Leonardo da Vinci’s paintbrush or antique sugar bowls. During a visit to Grandpa Pots, she uncovers the secret of Ghost Island and solves the puzzle of the floating teapot in Mr Goldrand’s junk shop. Only the nasty blackmailing letters from the mysterious “Magpie” present her with a seemingly insoluble mystery. Someone is testing the powers of the great investigator to their very limit…Will she be able to crack even this case? 15 original detective stories told in masterly fashion by the Spiegel bestselling author Andreas H. Schmachtl.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2022

        Kate Atkinson

        by Armelle Parey

        This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women's lives.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        Sherlock Holmes, the Master Detective (3). The Invisble Seventh Man

        by Oliver Pautsch/ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle/ Dominik Rupp

        What's going on in London? A mass breakout of prisoners, an attack on a hotel and a bank robbery - all that happens within a short while. Sherlock Holmes draws a rapid deduction: This cannot be an accident. He already has a theory what and most of all who is behind it. Remains to find out how his arch enemy managed to do that. But Sherlock is on his tracks because the thieves and their leader have left their fingerprints ...

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60

        by Jeffrey Richards

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2006

        The Scottish family tree detective

        by Rosemary Bigwood

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2006

        The Scottish family tree detective

        by Rosemary Bigwood, Colin Rogers

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 1995

        The Surname Detective

        Investigating surname distribution in England since 1086

        by Colin Rogers

        From the author of The Family Tree Detective, this guide provides the amateur genealogist or family historian with the skills to research the distribution and history of a surname. Colin Rogers uses a sample of 100 names, many of them common, to follow the migration of people through the centuries. Each of the 100 names is mapped since the Doomsday book in 1086. For those whose name is not among the sample, the book shows how to find out where namesakes live now, how they moved around the country through time, and how the name originated from a placename, a nickname or an occupation. Colin Rogers finishes this work by showing how the distribution of surnames can be studied irrespective of the size of the surrounding population, and reaches some interesting conclusions about which names are more reliable guides to migration since the 14th century. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2025

        Through the fiction of Phebe Gibbes (1764–90)

        Women, alienation, and prodigality in the long eighteenth century

        by Kathryn Freeman

        Through the Fiction of Phebe Gibbes places this prolific, newly recovered English writer at the centre of the revolutionary period. Gibbes's novels mark the struggles of women for agency in an expanding British empire, from the Seven Years' War to revolutions in American, Haiti and France. With Gibbes as a nexus in a lineage of women writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Kathryn S. Freeman offers a valuable perspective on the 'long eighteenth century', with Gibbes' own evolution mirroring that of the larger period. The study traces the development of Gibbes' authorial voice from satire to irony through a range of female characters subverting patriarchal oppression. Freeman guides the reader through patterns of narrative voice, concerns with gender and sexuality, and elements of wordplay through detailed discussion of five novels representing Gibbes' evolving representation of a subversive female subjectivity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        June 2012

        Poison, detection and the Victorian imagination

        by Ian Burney, Bertrand Taithe, Roger Cooter, Carolyn Steedman

        This fascinating book looks at the phenomenon of murder and poisoning in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the case of William Palmer, a medical doctor who in 1856 was convicted of murder by poisoning, it examines how his case baffled toxicologists, doctors, detectives and judges. The investigation commences with an overview of the practice of toxicology in the Victorian era, and goes on to explore the demands imposed by legal testimony on scientific work to convict criminals. In addressing Palmer's trial, Burney focuses on the testimony of Alfred Swaine Taylor, a leading expert on poisons, and integrates the medical, legal and literary evidence to make sense of the trial itself and the sinister place of poison in wider Victorian society. Ian Burney has produced an exemplary work of cultural history, mixing a keen understanding of the contemporary social and cultural landscape with the scientific and medical history of the period. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Teaching, Language & Reference
        October 2023

        Crafting crime fiction

        by Henry Sutton

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 1998

        Pulp

        Reading popular fiction

        by Scott McCracken

        Pulp brings together in one volume chapters on the best seller, detective fiction, popular romance, science fiction and horror. It combines a lucid and accessible account of the cultural theories that have informed the study of popular fiction with detailed readings of Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Colin Dexter, William Gibson, Stephen King, Iain Banks, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. Scott Mc Cracken argues that popular fiction serves a vital function: it provides us with the means to construct a workable sense of self in the face of the disorientating pressures of modernity. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2012

        Narration in nineteenth-century French short fiction

        Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob

        by Peter Cogman

        The short fiction that flourished in nineteenth-century France has attracted relatively little critical attention compared with the novel. This study focuses on some key stories by major authors of contes and nouvelles from the late 1820s to the 1890s, taking as a starting-point, aspects of narrative technique as a way of exploring not just characteristic strategies of short fiction, but also the ends to which they were put: recurrent themes, and the vision of mankind. Each chapter looks in some detail at three or four stories, referring briefly to other tales for illustration. The underlying point that emerges from this study is that the interest of a tale lies in the telling, not the events. ;

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