Court Case Fiction and Detective Fiction

Abstract

One of the fundamental themes of the world’s literature is crime and punishment. The Chinese traditional “court case fiction” (gong’an fiction) and detective fiction originating from the West largely bear such a theme, often with such a basic structure of “committing crime, investigating and analyzing the case, trial, and conviction.” Chinese court case fiction and Western detective fiction have much in common in many aspects, but due to different geographical, social and cultural backgrounds, they also differ greatly in many ways. Thus a comparative study of them may contribute to our better understanding of the typical features of the Chinese and Western crime fiction.