Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction

• The book prioritises textual analysis rather than a taxonomic survey of the chosen texts or readership patterns (which is often the case in dealings with works of crime fiction). • The book aligns itself with the identity-political strand of crime fiction research and recognises that crime fictions are multidimensional research objects, appearing not only as literary texts or socio-historical chronicles, but also as sites for the negotiation of various identities. The study therefore embraces an intertextual and interdisciplinary methodological matrix. • Whereas crime fiction studies often takes a nation-centred approach to the texts, one of this study’s main goals is to discover new perspectives through the comparison of crime fiction traditions from two different contexts. The discoveries give details of both similarities and divergences. This is not done to reinforce the notion of the nation, but rather to establish how the literary examples contribute to, accentuate and contest the wider discursive configurations underpinning the respective cultural settings of France and Scandinavia. • The texts constituting the corpus of the project belong to the more critically engaged strands of Scandinavian and French crime fiction. They have been chosen for their outspokenness on identity issues and because they in some way or another are concerned with themes of social struggle. • The book is concerned with establishing what precisely are viewed as constituting privileged issues within the social contracts of the French Fifth Republic and the Scandinavian welfare state.

Through a comparative analysis of twelve literary case studies, this book investigates societal discourses relating to citizenship, class, gender and ethnicity within the structures of the Scandinavian welfare state and French Republican universalism.This book offers a study of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and French crime fictions covering a fifty-year period from 1965 to the present, during which both Scandinavian and French societies have undergone significant transformations. Twelve literary case studies examine how crime fictions in the respective contexts have responded to shifting social realities, which have in turn played a part in transforming the generic codes and conventions of the crime novel. At the centre of the book's analysis is crime fiction's negotiation of the French model of Republican universalism and the Scandinavian welfare state, both of which were routinely characterised as being in a state of crisis at the end of the twentieth century. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book investigates the interplay between contemporary Scandinavian and French crime narratives, considering their engagement with the relationship of the state and the citizen, and notably with identity issues (class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in particular).