Crime

Abstract

We observed in the previous chapter that ‘detection’ can best be construed through the historicization of the mysteries which are its object. In this context the eighteenth century presents itself as a central moment of coincidence for our theoretical and historical concerns in that it sees, on the one hand, the emergence of the novel as a new and peculiarly modern narrative form for the developing industry of print and, on the other hand, an intense development in the figure of crime — precisely that figure specific to detection as a form for mastering mystery — as a central means of representing social conflict. More to the point, we find that the novel at its inception is haunted by this eminently secular topic. Why was it then, as Lennard Davis puts it, that ‘There seems to have been something inherently novelistic about the criminal, or rather the form of the novel seems to demand a criminal content’?¹ One answer, Davis suggests, lies in its own discursive antecedents, particularly in relation to the new press. The orthodox view of the novel underwrites its modern literary status by viewing it as the realist descendent of the high-cultural prose romance.