Oliver Eccles (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
uclzowe@ucl.ac.uk

Customs and Duties: Importing the Detective Across Networks of World Literature

The popularity of detective fiction has made it a pre-eminently global genre since its inception in the nineteenth-century, propelling narratives about modernity, crime and transgression across borders. My research examines the genre’s earliest development and adaptation in light of the transnational infrastructures of communication and publishing behind its dissemination. By its nature, detective fiction invited circulation. Printed in dime novels and newspapers, sold at train stations, seemingly ‘completed’ and thence discarded upon the resolution of a central mystery, these are stories which not only travel on global networks but are prepared to make many stops along the way. Through a comparative study of two geographically dissociate nodes on the network, Argentina and Japan, the project will map detective fiction’s diffusion between Europe and a global literary field. In so doing, my thesis will illuminate its understudied impact on the formation of emerging, international notions of justice and detection.

I am examining the Western detective’s migration through literary, periodical, legal and criminological sources, working with primary and secondary texts in Spanish, Japanese, French and English. The authors I read include, but are not limited to, Carlos Olivera, Carlos Monsalve and Felix Alberto Zabalía in Argentina, Kuroiwa Ruikō, Okamoto Kidō and Saburo Iwai in Japan. At heart a literary project, this research nevertheless draws upon the perspectives of translation studies and periodical studies. I aim to spark interdisciplinary conversations between hitherto separate scholarship in Latin America and Japan Studies, and to be of interest to crime fiction aficionados both within and beyond academia.

Primary Supervisor: Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

Secondary Supervisor: Dr Xiaofan Amy Li