Overview
Guilty But Insane takes an historical approach to golden age detective fiction by Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Gladys Mitchell. It examines how writers and readers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind as they related to the commission, the investigation, and the punishment of crime. Under the lens of psychology, the detective novel is revealed as a site for the negotiation of competing interpretations of sanity and insanity. An unexplored depth and subtlety is revealed in detective novels that address major controversies in legal and psychiatric theory and practice, while significant resonances with specific concerns of modernist fiction come into focus for the first time. During the interwar years, proponents of competing psychological schools challenged legal concepts of responsibility and free will. In response, golden age writers began to reflect on the genre's promise to accomplish true and just solutions in a social order in which the relationship between law and justice was being problematized on several fronts. By making connections between high modernism and popular culture, and by tracing the impact of psychological discourses across a range of different cultural outputs, this book makes a persuasive case for reading detective fiction historically. It aims to demonstrate the richness of these texts and their value for scholarship, not only as historical documents or residues of discourse, but as literary texts which challenge, subvert, toy with and test the prevailing values and prejudices of interwar Britain.
Full Product Details
Author: Samantha Walton (Lecturer in English Literature, Lecturer in English Literature, Bath Spa University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.20cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.474kg
ISBN: 9780198723332
ISBN 10: 0198723334
Pages: 322
Publication Date: 29 January 2015
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Walton successfully relates all of these societal and literary developments into a coherent whole, and brings a new perspective to the ongoing reinterpretation and reevaluation of golden age crime fiction. Brittain Bright, The Review of English Studies
Author Information
Samantha Walton is a Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University. Previously, she taught at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her doctorate. In 2013 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a Bright Ideas Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum.
