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The Reader and the Detective Story
George N. Dove

Popular Press


The Reader and the Detective Story is unique—it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of response theory (especially those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss) to the reading of a tale of detection.

George Dove demonstrates how the English soft-boiled mystery and the American private-eye story, although they have different settings and develop different plots, belong in the same subgenre and follow the same formula, inherited directly from Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

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The Reader and the Detective Story book cover looks like a brown door, with the title in the door's window pane.

Published in 1997
LC: 96-047340 PN
216 pp.   6 x 9
ISBN-10: 0-87972-731-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-87972-731-4
Cloth $39.95 t
ISBN-10: 0-87972-732-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-87972-732-1
Paper $16.95 t




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