Beyond the Island, Paris and the Nation: For a Transnational Corsican Crime Fiction
Crime fiction has been central to the rise of regional literatures in the Francosphere in recent years.Public interest can be gauged by the increase in regional literary festivals, though this success has yet to gain traction among scholars. 1 My focus here will be on one of these neglected regional success stories: Corsican crime fiction.Three different perspectives-historical, national and transnational-will be adopted to situate Corsican crime fiction not only as a regional manifestation of French crime fiction but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a mobile genre inscribing itself in a wider, transnational canon, and, while preserving its uniqueness, fostering a new idea of Frenchness. Corsican crime fiction and Parisian spaces: a historical perspective on the crime genreHistorically, crime fiction has often been perceived as a second-rate literary genre, becoming an object worthy of scholarly analysis only from the early 1970s with Tsvetan Todorov's Typologie du roman policier (Paris: Seuil, 1971).Since its inception as a literary mode of expression, crime fiction has exploited urban spaces.Edgar Allan Poe's short stories 2 and their translation into French played a key role in the recognition of crime fiction as a bona fide literary genre, and, crucially, of the establishment of Paris as its quintessential urban setting.This tradition evolved in the 1940s when Paris became the theatre of a French crime fiction renaissance with Marcel Duhamel's Srie Noire: Parisian hard-boiled crime fiction 'traduit de l'amricain'.The series turned novels that were originally (albeit often only allegedly) American into a markedly Parisian genre and paved the way for a new tradition of French crime fiction, marked by serialization, where publishing houses distribute series of crime fiction novels on a quasi-industrial scale to appeal to a wide audience. 3 The Srie Noire, Rivages Noir and Folio Policier, for example, include authors whose works are not technically situated within the geographical boundaries of Paris, but which are nonetheless branded by Paris through the publishing houses that bring them to life.Since the 1980s, regional crime fiction in France has been gaining interest among French readers, primarily because it offers a departure from the traditional models seen in French crime fiction thus far.And Corsican crime fiction, because it relies on this model whilst transcending it, situates itself precisely within the historical tradition of crime fiction in France.It may appear surprising that Corsican crime fiction was born in the late 1990s in Marseille, through Marseillais publishing houses.There were only a handful of authors who were applying specifically Corsican tropes to Marseillais crime, which resulted in confusion and stagnation, and it was not as successful as its publishers had originally
Read more
Filter 1
1