Introduzione

Crime precedes detection both in the process of any routine story and in the originary development of this genre. Both dizzying excitement and alarming threat are structural to the early narratives that shaped the process of crime fiction, and those dialectically-linked forces are most accurately described, and also historically located, in the social and personal forces that generated the power of the concept, and the integrated emotion, of the sublime as it developed at the interface of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight's introduction explores this early stage in the development of crime fiction, setting the ground for the multifaceted approach to the phenomenon of crime fiction this miscellaneous volume offers.