We are saddened by the news that Professor Charles Grivel has passed away. He was a mentor to many scholars working on Literature and Media studies, and was a tutelary figure in our international association devoted to the study of Popular and Media cultures, the LPCM, Continue reading
Dominique Jeannerod presented at the University of Hull Conference 21st Century Engagements – Countering Crises (17 & 18 September, 2014) a paper advocating the use of quantitative methods to assess political contents in Crime Fiction. Based on a corpus of 4000 crime novels reviewed in the BILIPO’s yearbook Les Crimes de l’année it uses digital tools and instruments of spatial visualisation to offer a new picture, relativising assumptions regarding the committed nature of French Crime Fiction. Comparing quantitative methods based on new digital tools with more traditional, textual and contextual, literary, historical and socio-literary approaches, the paper argued for the use of digital innovations to evaluate and give a representative account of the various types of political engagements happening around or embedded within Crime Fiction
On the 24th of April, Dominique Jeannerod presented at the Bath Conference, Crime Fiction, Darkness and Desire a paper titled Quantifying the thrill : The point of distant-reading crime fiction. This paper considered the crime genre in its essentially transnational dimension and sought to provide a methodology to assess and compare the success of crime fiction in international circulation. To that effect, it proposed to reflect on the processes of translation, imitation and appropriation of foreign crime fiction in post WW II Europe, in a crucial period in the history of the genre. The fascination for American hard-boiled fiction and 1940’s cinema in continental Europe, as reflected there by authors, markets, publishers and readers has in turn contributed in shaping the genre internationally and has led to its 1960’s evolution and re-politicization. But how is it possible to reliably identify and quantify such processes? How is it possible to navigate and manage the profusion of published titles exemplary of such circulation, in order to give an accurate and representative picture of the international exchanges at play in this particular period? What are the most appropriate research methods and the best digital tools that can support this type of research? How can the relevant data be collected and archived, and how can the collected data be visualised and shared?
Stemming from an AHRC funded research Grant on the Visualisation of Crime Fiction circulation conducted at the University of Belfast, and based on the 130 000 entries in the catalogues of the only Public library devoted to Crime fiction, the Paris-based BILIPO, this paper offered to apply Franco Moretti’s approach (distant reading, maps and graphs) to quantifying the popularity of Crime Fiction in continental Europe.
The database constituted with the help of the BILIPO was shown to be crucial to help answering a set of questions which are critical to a European historiography of the genre, such as the following:
International Crime Fiction Research Group 