Tackling the current success of ‘regional crime novels’, it will consider the dialectic relationship between local settings and law enforcement units on the one hand and markets and crime globalisation on the other. How can the apparently ‘universal’ conventions of the genre allow crime writers to explore the peculiarity of their own geographical, historical and cultural background, and the specificity of national, and often peripheral, areas? How has this evolution reconfigured the traditional characteristics of the crime genre? How was globalisation seen from this perspective? How have these representations of the local been received respectively by local and foreign readers? How have audiovisual media contributed to, and influenced, the circulation of this production?
Has the process highlighted the critical political and cultural potential of the crime genre, or on the contrary watered it down as a form of tourism (regional crime fictions as guidebooks)? Similarly, have their activation in Crime fiction revitalised regional identities or merely petrified them as ‘museified’ entities, or merchandised them as commoditized stereotypes?
Further details on the Institute’s International Crime Fiction project research group can be found here.
Please click here for the conference programme.