Status Updates From Detective Fiction (Cultural...

Rzepka continues his history of detection with a long line of ancestry, from literature in the early 19th century through to the turn of the century. He continues to reaffirm his original thesis on the changing habits in empiricism and historicism for the change in (or toward) detection in fiction in a manner that works partly as timeline of literary events and close reading of key literary texts.

Rzepka takes a look in the second chapter at the cultural forces informing the growth of the detective genre in the 19th century, and does a pretty good job at summarizing changing forces in both historical studies and in psychological studies, and the way detective fiction tends to evolve in the same direction. His premise is to offer an explanation of why we might read detective fiction, and it's reasonable.

My only criticism so far about Rzepka's opening chapter is simply that he's a little bit too reductive in what he believes is the reader's relationship with detective (or detection) fiction on the whole, and misses a vital component to what detective (or detection) fiction can offer to postmodern readers.