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Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism

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Teaching Crime Fiction

Part of the book series: Teaching the New English ((TENEEN))

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Abstract

This chapter addresses how crime fiction criticism can be taught at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, offering teaching strategies, specific assignments, and suggestions for effective pedagogy. Course contexts include online and in-person delivery, courses dedicated to crime fiction, and classes that incorporate crime fiction as one part of thematic or period-based literary study. Examples are drawn from English, American, and Scandinavian crime fiction. The chapter begins with an overview of the field’s development and current status, presents teaching strategies and results, suggests potential resources, and closes with a case study of a postgraduate seminar in American crime fiction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Heta Pyrhönen, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 8.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, “American Literary Independence” and “National Literature and Imagination” in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. G. Kennedy (NY: Penguin, 2006), 582–84 and 594–95.

  3. 3.

    Moretti argues that “both synchronically and diachronically … the novel is the system of its genres” (Graphs, Maps, Trees [London: Verso, 2005], 30) and he uses the Sherlock Holmes stories as one of his central experimental examples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Governors State University, University Park, IL, USA

    Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

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  1. Rosemary Erickson Johnsen
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Correspondence to Rosemary Erickson Johnsen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, United Kingdom

    Charlotte Beyer

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Johnsen, R.E. (2018). Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism. In: Beyer, C. (eds) Teaching Crime Fiction. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_12

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