"Crime Narratives: Crossing Cultures"

Crime is common to all cultures but is simultaneously culturally specific: narratives of crime, then, cross cultures while articulating cultural difference. Crime is personal and political; forms of deviance and transgression are not a-historical and ready made but represent a continuous negotiation between social and cultural forces, between the individual and the collective. Crime narratives can also act as a kind of connective tissue across disciplinary boundaries, forging links yet questioning the relations between fact and fiction, literature and law, history, philosophy, psychology, languages, social science, media studies, medicine. Crime is not confined to or contained in a single form: its narratives appear in print, on celluloid, canvas, in stone. There are written narratives and oral accounts, witness statements and pop songs, photographs and films. Crime narratives are a nexus and offer a place of commonality from which cultures and cultural relations can be re-read and disciplinary boundaries and relationships reconsidered. Introduction Heather Worthington; Maurizio Ascari Pages 89 – 93 From Egan To Reynolds: The shaping of urban ‘Mysteries’ in England and France, 1821–48 Louis James Pages 95 – 106 ‘Dreadful Beyond Description’: Mary Carpenter's prison reform writings and female convicts in Britain and India Anne Schwan Pages 107 – 120 Crime Narratives In Peter Ackroyd's Historiographic Metafictions Petr Chalupský Pages 121 – 131 Family Discord: Challenging the choreography of crime fiction in P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman Kate Watson Pages 133 – 141 Food and Crime: What's eating the crime novel? Angelica Michelis Pages 143 – 157 In Search Of The Final Solution: Crime narrative as a paradigm for exploring responses to the Holocaust Anna Richardson Pages 159 – 171 Gomorrah: Crime goes global, language stays local Flavia Cavaliere Pages 173 – 188