The rise and development of Chinese detective fiction

This dissertation examines the history and significance of detective fiction in the discourse of Chinese modernity. Through analyzing representative samples of the most prominent works and translations of Chinese detective fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, this study aims to assess the contributions of detective fiction, as popular literature, to Chinese modernity and literary modernization. It studies detective fiction and the plurality of Chinese modernity from various perspectives, such as detective fiction and traditional Chinese ethical relationships, detective fiction and the discourse of science, detective fiction and Shanghai's metropolitan culture, and the interaction between Western detective fiction and traditional Chinese court-case literature. Through these issues, it argues that from the end of nineteenth century to the early modern era, detective fiction, by virtue of its close affiliation with law, science and urban culture, directly documented the most significant events in China, including transformations in modern Chinese legal institutions, a nationwide obsession with science as well as the phantasmagoria side of metropolitan life. It offered China a new form of cultural mediation between the traditional and the modern, and between East and West; that late Qing literati considered detective fiction a means of addressing traumatic national crises; that Republican intellectuals used the framework of detective fiction to disseminate their ideas on science, morality, and urbanization; and that Western writers combined elements of detective fiction and traditional Chinese crime literature to create the notion of a noble and mysterious Oriental world.