Crime Fiction As World Literature

Crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres. What's more, crime fiction is a part of our literary heritage and is intertwined with the development of today's consumer society. Part of Bloomsbury major new series Literatures as World Literature, this is the first book to treat crime fiction in its full global and plurilingual dimensions, taking the genre seriously as a participant in the international sphere of world literature. In a wide-ranging panorama of the genre, 21 critics discuss crime fiction from Bulgaria, China, Israel, Mexico, Scandinavia, Kenya, Catalonia, and Tibet, among other locales. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature,Crime Fiction as World Literature gives new insights not only into the genre itself but also into the transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape of contemporary popular culture.

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, USA, where he is also Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Professor Damrosch is one of the world's foremost authorities on World Literature, past President of the American Comparative Literature Association, and author or editor of 17 books, including the ground-breakingWhat Is World Literature? (2003; translated into seven languages). Among his other publications are How to Read World Literature (2009),The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh ( 2007), andWorld Literature in Theory (edited; 2014).

Theo D'haen is Professor of English and American Literatures at K.U. Leuven, Belgium. He is the author or editor of 53 books, includingAmerican Literature: A History (2014), The Routledge Concise History of World Literature(2012), World Literature: A Reader (edited with Cesar Dominguez and Mads Rosendahl, 2013),A World History of Literature (2012), and The Routledge Companion to World Literature (edited with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, 2012).

Louise Nilsson is Teaching Assistant & Researcher in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.