Crime Fiction as World Literature ed. by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, Theo D’haen (review)

If any genre exemplifies what is called world literature, it would seem to be crime fiction. Arguably the most popular of literary categories—made up of works representing virtually every national literature and regional culture, and outperforming all genres in global book sales, appearances on bestseller lists, and sheer number of translations into foreign languages—crime fiction appears to be an especially fitting subject for Bloomsbury Academic’s “Literatures as World Literature” series. Of the eight volumes in the series to date, this is the only one devoted entirely to a genre rather than to a national literature, individual author, or artistic movement. Yet the choice, in the editors’ words, of the “eminently worldly genre of crime fiction” (5) for this role raises the inevitable question: should this genre’s global popularity be the chief reason for considering it, before all other genres, as “world literature”? And if so, what does this “worldly” genre’s close association, and even affinity, with “world literature” in the sense that the term is used here reveal about that term itself and about its relation and relevance to literary studies in general?

To be sure, the editors make their position clear from the start: “Often discussed largely in terms of elite productions, world literature has been studied too little in terms of more popular writings” (2). To that end, the editors readily acknowledge that their concern is less with studying literature per se than with “explor[ing] the literary system that surrounds the books and makes them accessible to the reader—a sociological approach that is becoming increasingly important in world literature scholarship today” (5). Implied here is a distinction between traditional literary scholarship in which literature is studied as a discourse that depicts, critiques, or presents alternatives to normative, received views of social and historical “realities,” and “world literature scholarship” in which literary studies essentially becomes a branch of sociology. This latter mode of “scholarship” is concerned less with literary analysis than with tracking the circulation of “bestselling genre fiction,” which, the editors claim, “fully illustrates what Marx and Engels enticingly describe as world literature’s ‘intercourse in every direction’” (2).

The passage referenced here from the Communist Manifesto itself appears as an epigraph to the volume’s introduction, declaring that the “intellectual creations of individual nations [have] become common property,” and that “from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” Yet even if “national and local literatures” are no longer the intellectual property of “individual nations” but the “common property” of “world literature,” must this global worldview mean the loss of any distinction between world literature as an intellectual ideal and the mundane reality of what the editors call a “worldwide literary market” catering to “the fascination people feel for serial killers”? Besides the “substantial economic consequences,” which globalization entails “for bestselling writers such as Agatha Christie [and] even for the tourist trade” (1), does not the growing inseparability of world literature and the “worldwide literary market” also have substantial intellectual and cultural consequences for non-bestselling literary authors (including authors of crime literature) and their literate readers who are not simply gawking “tourists” feeding on a steady diet of bestselling crime fiction?

Readers of Crime Fiction as World Literature will readily note its conflation of crime fiction and crime literature to the latter’s disadvantage. Only two of the essays deal with works that would technically be considered crime “literature”—Michaela Bronstein’s influence study of Dostoevsky’s, Joseph Conrad’s, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s crime novels, and Delia Ungureanu’s essay on Louis Aragon’s Le Cahier noir and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book as works of “surrealist noir.” Whereas the works discussed in these two essays are centrally concerned with crime, the texts addressed in the seventeen other essays deal primarily with criminal investigation—in other words, with detective fiction. The interchangeable use...