Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 Criminal Pursuits : Teaching Crime Fiction from New Zealand and Australia
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Crime fiction recreates itself incessantly and, in doing so, expands and redraws the lines of its market, partly in response to its condition as a globalized, popular textual commodity. Its emergence—and especially its re-emergence —in Australia and New Zealand strikingly, but problematically, exemplifies this rule. An inevitable question when one turns to antipodean crime fiction, then, is how new the New Zealand crime story is, or the Australian, considering that the attraction of this literature is likely to be registered in bestseller lists and as a global phenomenon. Despite the ever-ramifying conservatism of the larger tradition of crime writing, a nonlocal course in Australasian crime writing necessarily deals in novelty and differ-ence, in its forms as well as in the cultural investigations it carries out in the guise of its fictions. The corollary of this claim is that, for all its difference, Australasian crime is intelligible first as an instantiation of a textual tradition that has its origins elsewhere. I argue, then, for the kind of course that draws crime writing from the Australasian region into a study of the global field of crime fiction. ' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature Nicholas Birns (editor), Nicole Moore (editor), Sarah Shieff (editor), New York (City) : Modern Language Association of America , 2016 9421541 2016 anthology criticism essay

    'Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality—one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations’ literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn.' (Publication summary)

    New York (City) : Modern Language Association of America , 2016
    pg. 291-301
Last amended 18 Aug 2017 08:20:11
291-301 Criminal Pursuits : Teaching Crime Fiction from New Zealand and Australiasmall AustLit logo
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