The mysteries of modern life : mystery fiction, popular narrative, and the politics of vision / Sara Hackenberg

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hackenberg, Sara, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism.

Detective and mystery stories.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2026

Summary:

"Mystery fiction has long been regarded a conservative genre that focuses on crime, surveillance, and the restoration of disrupted social order. Such assessments, however, usually consider only a very small subset of works. We find a very different story if we consider the mysteries of modern life more widely, starting with the international, penny-press phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth-century citymysteries narrative. Expanding and historicizing the genre in this way reveals diverse variants of popular mystery that emerged out of the city mysteries– up to and including the detective story– and that constitute an extraordinarily wide-ranging and socially radical genre. The paradoxical attitudes towards visual powers and problems at the heart of the modern mystery cultivates a form of master-perception concerned more with identification with than identification of and models forms of empathetic vision that work to challenge the very social hierarchies the genre has often been understood to uphold"-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Introduction : A modernity of looking : the “true mystery” of the visible

“Paradoxopolis!” : urban mysteries and the politics of vision

Mystery’s social kaleidoscope

Seeing as reading : Poe’s urban mysteries

Murdering the urban mysteries : sensation fiction and the allegorical detective

Detective fever

Mystery into cinema

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (Cambridge Core, viewed August 26, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version: Hackenberg, Sara Mysteries of modern life

ISBN:

9781009604819

1009604813

9781009604826

1009604821

OCLC:

1585502323

Publisher Number:

CIPO000365811

CIPO000381748

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license