Abstract
What is the role of the sublime within crime fiction of the romantic period? How do romantic crime fictions respond to the intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment? And what differentiates this body of writing from subsequent developments in the genre? This essay responds to these questions by considering one of the most critically neglected texts in the proto history of crime fiction, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Hogg's use of the sublime will be read alongside its treatment in two other foundational pieces of criminography: William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794) and Thomas De Quincey's essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827). Together these texts assert and illustrate the importance of the sublime as an aesthetic trope for understanding the radical inauguration of crime fiction, and the genres potential to critique the ideological assumptions of an emergent bourgeois modernity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | From the Sublime to City Crime |
| Editors | Maurizio Ascari, Stephen Knight |
| Place of Publication | Monaco |
| Publisher | LiberFaber |
| Pages | 107-130 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9782365801720 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |