The Reception of Detective Fiction: a Study of Reader Reactions
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The Reception of Detective Fiction: A Study of Reader Reactions and Expectations by Victoria Antoniou A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Victoria Antoniou The Reception of Detective Fiction: A Study of Reader Reactions and Expectations Doctoral Dissertation Submitted to the School of English Language and Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Dissertation Committee: Approved: Karin Boklund- Lagopoulou, Adviser ---------------------------------------- Domna Pastourmatzi, Co-Adviser ---------------------------------------- Nikolaos Kontos, Co-Adviser ---------------------------------------- Department Chairperson: Accepted: ---------------------------------------- Date of oral defence: __________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction. ............................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Sociological Approaches to Popular Literature and Culture............................... 6 Chapter Two: What the Critics Say about Detective Fiction.................................................... 29 Chapter Three: Methodological Considerations...................................................................... 50 Chapter Four: DorothyL: A Description of the Site and the Establishment of the Corpus..... 61 Chapter Five: Statistical Analysis of the Corpus...................................................................... 100 Chapter Six: The Readers and the Critics.....................………………....……........................ 212 Epilogue. .................................................................................................................................... 243 Appendix: DorothyL Subscriber and Occupations List............................................................. 266 Works Cited......……………………………………………………………………............... 2 74 Acknowledgements ... my first fruits present themselves to thee; Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came, And must return. George Herbert, “The Dedication” It is a pleasure to thank the many people who made this thesis possible. First and foremost, I would like to take this chance to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis adviser Dr. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, who has been a constant source of support, enthusiasm, and knowledge throughout. My incomplete digestion of relevant concepts and literature, and my spasmodic writing habits were only few of the shortcomings she has had to battle with. Her inclination to pair critique with profound empathy, willfully bearing the occasional brunt of my frustration with equanimity and commitment, and the determination, availability, and sense of joy with which she has addressed my queries have set for me a high standard. This dissertation is a very small tribute to an inspiring teacher from a student still genuinely wishing to learn from her. It has also been a great honour for me to receive guidance and feedback from the other two members of my committee Dr Domna Pastourmatzi and Dr Nikolaos Kontos. They have made their skills available in various ways. Their advice and experience has been invaluable in my quest of useful literature. Their insights are second to none, and their rigor, passion, persistence, and meticulousness paradigmatic. Their encouragement and kindness are greatly appreciated. Many thanks are also due for their editing interventions and precise sense of language which contributed to the final copy. It would have been next to impossible to write this thesis without their suggestions and overall reinforcement. Aristotle University and the Department of English, in particular, have provided the appropriate milieu and equipment needed to complete my thesis. I would regret my doctoral years had it not been for the convivial environment sustained by the teaching, library, administrative, and technical personnel as well as by fellow students. All helped render those years a wonderful experience. I would particularly like to acknowledge the assistance of the staff at the Information Technology Center and thank them for sourcing me with SPSS and of the staff at the Network Operation Center for their unfailing patience and insistence on culturing the ignorant in certificates and protocols. I also treasure all precious moments shared with doctoral buddies, and would really like to thank them for their camaraderie and entertainment. Philosophical debates, exchanges of knowledge, and venting of distress with a friendly and cheerful group of fellow students helped enrich the experience and battle academic anxiety. Thus they deserve a loud mention. This dissertation was made possible due to the assistance of the Ministry of Education and a leave of absence that facilitated mobility, research and also immersion in academic mentality. Without it my ambition to conclude this dissertation could have hardly been realised. I am, therefore, deeply indebted, hoping that I have made good use of the opportunity offered. My thesis grew out of a series of postings that lovers of detective fiction supplied and it is to them that I will forever be obliged. The moderators and list owners of DorothyL Michael J. Kovacs, Diane K. Kovacs, and Kara L. Robinson have granted their permission for me to use the material provided by their posters. I was particularly delighted to interact with Ms Diane K. Kovacs, who eagerly embraced my plan. I would also like to thank all people who have been a constant source of inspiration and creativity as their appreciation of knowledge, research, and admiration of mental or physical expeditions has helped form a role-model that defies roadblocks and cherishes openness and new horizons instead. Those people have been, each in their unique way, a source of unfailing excitement before but also during my doctoral study and include Aimilia Fratzoli-Papandreou, Angelika & Günther Kube, Karin & Joern Koch, Rev. Demetrios Vakaros, and the late Apostolos Grammatikas and Evangelos Karageorgopoulos. I will be forever thankful to them for the precious lessons that would have taken me a lifetime to master. Above all, however, my heartfelt gratitude goes to my loving parents Sofia and Apostolos Antoniou whose mentality, values, and counseling instilled the love of knowledge and paved the way for a privileged education, as well as my brother Kostas Antoniou whose adherence to goal setting, solution-oriented disposition, and technical assistance at each turn of the road has helped make my work smoother. Their emotional reassurance and steadfast caring encouraged me beyond what I can appreciate. The profoundest understanding of commitment to goal achieving is the unsuspected contribution of my niece Eftyhia-Victoria Antoniou during the concluding stages of the dissertation. To all four of them I dedicate this thesis as an acknowledgment of their unflagging love and devotion to helping me realise dreams and relishing in my endeavours — always in respect of the suspiciousness of truth claims, of course! — my truest possible self. In recognition of such favourable learning surroundings that has allowed me to grow academically as well as personally, I assume responsibility for every aspect of this thesis and acknowledge that any errors or weaknesses in the theoretical or methodological assumptions employed, any crucial, or lesser drawbacks and shortcomings in my conclusions are entirely the bad produce of my tardiness and thus my own fault. Abstract Detective fiction has been an appealing reading pastime for over a century. However, despite numerous sociological studies on popular culture and literature, the consumer/reader largely remains an elusive persona. The sociology of literature and reception studies traditionally focus on a hypothetical reader whose horizon of expectations must be reconstructed from extant texts and/or the fiction itself. This dissertation zeroes in on the actual perusing individual. The aim is to achieve an empirically-constituted, sociological portrait of contemporary readers of popular detective fiction and involves a twofold objective; to identify their conceptual classificatory schemas and compare them with the respective schemas of critical approaches to popular detective fiction from its inception to the present. The dissertation meets the aim through an extensive study of relevant literature and a treatment of postings to DorothyL as an empirical database that comprises marked combinations of socio-literary information. The statistical processing of an empirically- constructed corpus via a combination of qualitative content analysis and Greimasian structural semantics yields important information. It ascertains that daily-recorded correspondences of taste regarding the literary can indeed provide an eloquent description of the contemporary bibliophile. The key finding is that the contemporaneous detective-fiction reader is keen on a combination of characteristics. This combination emerges in the late 1970s and intertwines historicity with structural excellence. The main conclusion drawn is that the empirical deficiency in popular-literature studies has led theorists of culture to perceive its consumer as a lobotomised adherent to the status quo, and popular fiction as one of the instruments for the operation. However, the current approach reveals that