An Overview of Crime Fiction
Crime Fiction is essentially about the solving of a crime, usually a mystery of murder. Crime Fiction texts question what it is to be human and raise questions about identity. The main feature of crime fiction is the plot and the story always reflects the culture and social values of when it was written. The texts are often part of a series featuring the same detective. The plot can also reflect the social changes of the time. Crime fiction is not static, nor is any genre, and there are many hybrid texts. Each sub-genre holds its own conventions that reflect their differing contexts.
The face remains that murder and law breaking are present in other genres aside from crime fiction. The features, therefor, do not categorize a genre; rather, genres are created through the rules for reading the members of a community share. However this doesn’t mean that crime fiction doesn’t have its own specific template. It is this template that has created the rules for reading and therefor the rules of crime fiction enable us to read into a text. This can also limit the way meaning is constructed for the writers and readers alike by confining to the conventions of the genre.
Crime fiction can be divided into six main stages or sub-genres. These sub-genres are categorized by their time periods and also their writing styles and conventions. As time and contexts changed crime fiction grew and developed as a genre. The six main sub-genres are Early Crime Fiction (sensation novels), The Golden Age, The Intuitionists, The Realists, Hard-boiled and Contemporary Crime Fiction. Edgar Allen Poe created the first notable detective of Crime Fiction in 1840.
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