W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2015 He Do the Police in Different Voices: the Influence of Detection Fiction in T. S. Eliot's Works Claire Weaver College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the American Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Liturgy and Worship Commons Recommended Citation Weaver, Claire, "He Do the Police in Different Voices: the Influence of Detection Fiction in .T S. Eliot's Works" (2015). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 169. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/169 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Weaver 2 Detective Fiction reached its “golden age” between the World Wars at the peak of the modernist era. Like the highbrow literature of its day, detective fiction grapples with the pressing questions of the 20th century: Who is responsible for our current state of things? Is there a master narrative that can reconcile contradictory perspectives on the truth? Can human understanding access such a narrative? Jon Thompson, in his book Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernity, addresses some of the overlap between detective fiction and high modernism: Whether fictional or philosophical, modernist writing is fascinated with uncovering, revealing, decoding, sleuthing. Within the modernist worldview, there is the assumption of a remoter ‘something’—a hidden truth, a concealed clue to existence, a sense that experience is coded, and that ‘beneath’ or ‘within’ the code, there is an underlying pattern of meaning that is capable of resolving ‘the nightmare of history’ into an understandable, stable, coherent narrative .