Abstract
In ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Franco Moretti argues that literary devices such as clues develop under the simultaneous pressure of external factors such as advances in forensic science, and internal ones like the ‘morphological circle of virtue’ these devices create by making every part of a narrative interesting and significant. In this chapter, I will critically examine Moretti’s claims by proposing a relationship between the urban development (an ‘external’ factor) during the global nineteenth-century and the ways in which devices such as clues were used in detective fiction written in the ‘core’ and ‘semi-peripheral’ zones of the world-system. By comparing the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle and Priyanath Mukherjee, I will argue that the differences and similarities in the nature and use of clues point to the singular, unequal, and uneven nature of modernity. The ‘morphological circle of virtue’ created by such narratives may in the final instance then depend on the degree to which they register this historical reality and in so doing become ‘world-literary’ phenomena.
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Notes
- 1.
For a magisterial overview of the relationship between social power, material resources, and world history, see Michael Mann 2012.
- 2.
- 3.
A good example of critical engagement with Galtung’s idea of structural violence can be found in Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow’ violence (2011), as Boehmer and Davies also point out in their introduction.
- 4.
For a useful of world-systems theory, see Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004) and The Modern World-System, 3 vols (2011). For criticisms of Moretti’s use of world-systems analysis, see Christopher Prendergast and Benedict Anderson eds., Debating World Literature (2004).
- 5.
I myself am a member of the Warwick Research Collective, along with Sherae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro.
- 6.
For critical responses to WReC, see ‘Forum: Combined and Uneven Development’, Comparative Literature Studies 53.3 (2016), 503–561.
- 7.
For a paradigmatic expression of Holmes as a lodestone for Victorian nostalgia, see Edgar W. Smith’s editorial, ‘The Implicit Holmes’, Baker Street Journal 1.2 (April, 1946), 1–2.
- 8.
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Mukherjee, U.P. (2018). Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the Nineteenth Century. In: Boehmer, E., Davies, D. (eds) Planned Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_16
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