FRIAS Project
Lists in Police Work and Detective Fiction in Nineteenth-Century England – a Reception-Theoretical Analysis
My research project is part of Eva von Contzen’s ERC project “Lists in Literature and Culture” and examines lists as narrative elements through which strategies of categorization and sense-making can be illustrated. The project considers the emergence of forensics as a scientific practice alongside the formation of the literary genre of (British) detective fiction in order to trace parallel developments in believes about order, logic, and the objectivity of science in literary and sociocultural contexts. I read lists as cognitive tools which establish connections between disparate objects or conditions and thus serve as a crucial ordering principle and structuring device for both nineteenth-century literary texts and newly emerging scientific and professional practices. The aim of my project is to demonstrate how lists can serve to either affirm or renegotiate established and emerging structures of order in both literary and cultural contexts.