Keyword – history of genres

Kálai, Sándor:

“...has the Hungarian literature added anything to foreign detective fiction?”

The new international approaches to crime fiction are inspired by a comparative perspective and consequently analyse the coexistence of different regional and national traditions, translations, and logics of the book market. It is not surprising that the history of the genre is also being rewritten retrospectively. Instead of viewing the development of the genre as a straight line from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe on, which could be seen as the establishment of the dominance of the Anglo-American tradition, scholars are increasingly focusing on a complex interplay of different cultures and texts. In 1928, János Hankiss, a professor at the University of Debrecen, published his book The Detective Novel: Theory and History of “Popular Literature”. Its title and subtitle are more than promising: the study addresses the genre and its theoretical and historical issues. This paper seeks to draw attention to the parallel between Hankiss’s comparative approach and contemporary crime fiction criticism, the latter being partly an attempt to deconstruct the classical historical overviews told from an Anglo-American perspective, using the tradition of comparative literary studies.

Keywords: comparative literature, crime fiction, cultural industries, history of genres, literary history