Detective story genre and literary movements

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between the genre of detective story and literary movements. Although this genre was formed during the period of Romanticism, especially in the texts by E. A. Poe, it has been typically linked to Realism. This attitude was established in the early decades of the 20th century by authors such as G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Austin Freeman and others, who have canonized the conventions of the detective story. In the 1960s, however, there was a new trend of questioning the said attitude and fi nding traits of Romantic po/ethics in this genre. (Post)structuralism reads the detective story from the perspective of (post)modernist understandings of culture. The paper concludes that the attitude of the detective genre towards literary movements is not dependent only upon its inherent traits, but also upon the perspectives which analyze those traits. The neverending controversies regarding this problem stress the detective story’s longevity. And longevity, in many theories, equals quality.