1/5kiwifruit said:
Hey i have to make a timeline on the history of crime and under development of American and British crime fiction (1918 -1945)I put in stuff about Agatha christie and hard boiled fiction. So what do i put in for Diversification of the crime fiction genre (1900 - 60s) ??? Its just that both catargories cross over and im really really confused!
I would really appreciate your help~ Thank you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crime_Fiction
lol, I know, I know - its wiki, but it is worth a look.
And to answer your confusion:
Genre is essentially a category or species of literature, and the conventions are ways of marking the boundaries between the genres and subgenres. However literature does not exist in a vacuum, there is a society that reads it, and ultimately influences what type and style of conventions are employed - for example the concluding scene of "The Big Sleep" is quite violent and indiscrete however Golden Age texts such as those typically written by Agatha Christie will essentially have such horrid ideas swept under the carpet, yes people will be murdered but the grissliness is usually left out.
Usually. And that is the next important thing about genre - "there are no rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion" as said by Chandler or Gledhill(i forget which for the moment) - and this is an important fact to grasp,
everything flows into something else with genre, there are no discrete entities, no isolated conventions, at the heart off it crime fiction is just a swarm of conventions that a composer employs to address the current audience - and thus we are brought back to context and values. Values & context dictate boundaries of the genre and it should not be surprising that some values though not all, were shared by Britain and the US.
I hope my rambling makes sense - I might come clean it up later if I remember lol
