"Crime and the Sublime"

The fiction of detective fiction is an alibi to conceal the actual impact of the other narrative, the sublime, the underground river of crime fiction. This force pre-existed detective fiction, is in many ways foreclosed, but enduringly remains the dynamo of threat and nxiety that both drives the narrative of crime and insistently demands its euphemisations. The articles assembled in this issue of "La Questione Romantica" ("Crime and the Sublime") explore some facets of the complex relations between crime and the sublime, investigating texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their aim is to reconnect the development of detective fiction to the territory of gothic fiction, showing that this primitive need to represent the fearful and the uncanny actually survived the birth of the detective. The ensuing genre owed its sucess precisely to the tension between the rendering of oneiric 'night fears' and the need for closure that marks the triumph not only of justice over crime but also of rationality over the unconscious.