Since the 1980s, there has been an increasingly dynamic shift of crime fiction towards realist and social literature, a shift which has led writers to engage with the phenomenon of far right politics and ideology. Crime fiction,...
moreSince the 1980s, there has been an increasingly dynamic shift of crime fiction towards realist and social literature, a shift which has led writers to engage with the phenomenon of far right politics and ideology. Crime fiction, especially the european one, approaches contemporary problems (such as xenophobia, racism, sexism, immigration, refugees), moreover it has become one of the most attractive- both for the writers and the readers- ways of commenting on social reality, on ethics and on public life. From the 1970s to the present day, the issues of far-right politics, xenophobia and racist violence are represented literally in crime fiction variably. In fact, crime writers reflect on these problems in modern Europe and sometimes they even propose possible solutions by promoting the positive side of a multicultural european identity, based on cooperation and mutual respect.
Our talk focuses on the analysis of the main narrative axes of a corpus of novels written by oldest and newest European authors which represents the main styles of contemporary European crime fiction: nordic noir, mediterranean noir and french néo-polar, as well as other stylistic hybrids.
We present these novels in which the aforementioned sociopolitical and ideological upheaval is represented through the narrative and stylistic structures and conventions of crime fiction, as social literature. Also, in our presentation we have a diachronic view in the historical development both of the crime fiction genre and of the far right, racist, xenophobic and sexist manifestations in Europe, in parallel with the recent social, political, economic and cultural situation in Europe and even internationally.
