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With an amateur sleuth who is also a detective novelist and a murderer who turns out to be a parodist of crime fiction, Gilbert Adair’s postmodern parody of the British Golden Age whodunit, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006), encompasses a critical reflection on the genre in almost every formal and plot-related element. Yet, and this is where Adair’s approach differs from that of other postmodern writers, the text never abandons the conventions of the whodunit genre but merely takes up and heightens classic generic elements, among them self-referentiality, metafictionality, intertextuality, and parody. This essay examines the ways in which Adair’s exploration of postmodern concerns as to the artificiality not only of fiction but of reality builds and depends on generic structures and conventions rather than on subverting them, thereby demonstrating the potential, relevance, and interest of the Golden Age whodunit for postmodern thought and emphasizing the postmodern qualities which he identifies in the genre in general, and in Agatha Christie’s work in particular.

Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie’s memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story.

The present article discusses Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name is Red as a highly complex, multi-layered “whodunit,” based on Tzvetan Todorov's typology of detective fiction. The detective story in the novel relies heavily on ekphrasis (the oral description of an object, image, or artwork), which plays an important role in the elucidation of the murder, offering crucial clues in the story of the investigation. The old Ottoman art of miniature painting plays an important role in the solving of the murder case, alongside the numerous religious and cultural ramifications stemming from the East-West divide present throughout the novel, yet not easily decoded by the Western reader. Even though Pamuk's novel has been previously described as a “murder mystery,” Todorov's classification ensures the subtype of detective fiction the novel falls into can be more precisely defined. Additionally, the ingenious use of ekphrasis and the highlighting of essential conflicts within the Ottoman traditions of miniature paintings uncover new aspects of text-to-image “translations” which had been previously ignored by literary criticism.

Delle catene identitarie non si fa a meno, eppure liberarsene è necessario (Appiah 2018). Oggetto del saggio sono Scontro di civiltà (2006) di Lakhous e il Pasticciaccio di Gadda (1957), in cui Lakhous vede un modello. Ci si chiede: che luce retrospettiva getta il romanzo del nuovo italiano sul classico Pasticciaccio? La tesi avanzata è che l'avvertita semplicità del primo renda accessibili aspetti insoliti del notoriamente complesso Pasticciaccio. Ambedue esaminano il mito identitario, insufficiente sono come allora. Ma la mitografia espansa di Gadda e Lakhous non è nostalgica né reazionaria. Essa non restaura un ordine conservatore né dissolve nel frisson dell'irrazionale. Per Lakhous il punto sono identità e memoria etniche, nazionali e culturali; per Gadda è il loro enigma in accezione psicologica ed erotica, di genere queer. Ecco il loro carattere non-binario, antiromantico e antidealistico, cui Contini forse alludeva insinuando l'eventualità d'un “Gadda narratore” “persino più temerario del Gadda stilista”.

What has happened to the thoughtful, bowler-hatted figure of the forensic pathologist, the spectacular but fallible artist of battered flesh?

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 30 – August 3, 2005

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 30 – August 3, 2006

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 30 – August 3, 2006

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 30 – August 3, 2006