Crime Fiction and Ecology
From the Local to the Global

This Element represents the first single author study on crime fiction and ecology.

Nathan Ashman (Author)

9781009358637, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 January 2025

84 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.14 kg

This Element examines how contemporary ecological crime narratives are responding to the scales and complexities of the global climate crisis. It opens with the suggestion that there are certain formal limits to the genre's capacity to accommodate and interrogate these multifaceted dynamics within its typical stylistic and thematic bounds. Using a comparative methodological approach that draws connections and commonalities between literary crime texts from across a range of geographical locales – including works from Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America and Oceana – it therefore seeks to uncover examples of world crime fictions that are cultivating new forms of environmental awareness through textual strategies capable of conceiving of the planet as a whole. This necessitates a movement away from considering crime fictions in the context of their distinct and separate national literary traditions, instead emphasising the global and transnational connections between works.

Introduction: Ecological Crime Fiction: From the Local to the Global
1. 'Continuities of Experience': Mapping the Global through the Local
2. The 'Glocal' Turn: Ecological Crime Fiction and the Re/Deterritorialised State
3. 'Some New Thing': Speculative Futures and Hybrid Ecological Crime Fiction
Conclusion: Plotting Against Climate Change.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]