Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction

The book prioritises textual analysis rather than a taxonomic survey of the chosen texts or readership patterns (which is often the case in dealings with works of crime fiction). The book aligns itself with the identity-political strand of crime fiction research and recognises that crime fictions are multidimensional research objects, appearing not only as literary texts or socio-historical chronicles, but also as sites for the negotiation of various identities. The study therefore embraces an intertextual and interdisciplinary methodological matrix. Whereas crime fiction studies often takes a nation-centred approach to the texts, one of this study's main goals is to discover new perspectives through the comparison of crime fiction traditions from two different contexts. The discoveries give details of both similarities and divergences. This is not done to reinforce the notion of the nation, but rather to establish how the literary examples contribute to, accentuate and contest the wider discursive configurations underpinning the respective cultural settings of France and Scandinavia.The texts constituting the corpus of the project belong to the more critically engaged strands of Scandinavian and French crime fiction. They have been chosen for their outspokenness on identity issues and because they in some way or another are concerned with themes of social struggle. The book is concerned with establishing what precisely are viewed as constituting privileged issues within the social contracts of the French Fifth Republic and the Scandinavian welfare state.