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1 results

  • Chapter 9 - The Automaton Detective

  • from Part III - Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
  • Edited by Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Thomas Vranken, University of the South Pacific
  • Book:
    Victorian Automata
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 195-207

  • Summary

    Early detective fiction’s anxious obsession with constructing a respectable canonical lineage ensured that texts in the genre are typically both explicit and repetitive in their intertextual referencing, and early detective fiction stories tend to link themselves back to a fairly limited set of precursor texts and tropes. This chapter argues that the automaton became one of detective fiction’s central recurring symbols in the Victorian period, a contested figure lying at the heart of a struggle over the genre and the worldview that it contained.