This chapter presents the book’s theoretical framework, which consists in an understanding of crime fiction as an inherently mobile genre. Where crime fiction has traditionally, which typically means since the first texts of Edgar Allan Poe, been seen as static and staid, it is argued that it is in fact defined by three forms of mobility: 1) the mobility of meaning (the textual fluidity that characterizes crime fiction irrespective of the detective’s authoritative solution); 2) the mobility of genre (resulting from the interplay of affirming and violating genre rules and boundaries); and 3) transnational mobility (crime fiction as a transnational practice characterized by the multidirectional transmission and adaptation of styles, structures and themes across national borders). This theory of crime fiction mobility enables a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for our reading of individual crime fiction texts.

This article presents a comparative study of romantic anti-Americanism focusing on Britain, Germany, and France. On the basis of the notion that romanticism invented what might be called the basic vocabulary of anti-American discourse, the article presents a taxonomy of this vocabulary and point to the determining factors underlying the romantic disaffection for America and Americans. Five motifs are singled out as fundamental to romantic anti-Americanism: the lack of history and culture in the US, the crass materialism of its inhabitants, their vulgarity, their religious excesses, and the flaws of the American political system. The article closes with an interpretation of romantic anti-Americanism as a strongly self-affirming, Eurocentric discourse, which accustomed Europeans to think of Europe and America as antithetical entities-thereby paving the way for cultural constructions not only of the American "other", but also of a common European identity.

is a polarizing figure in contemporary French criticism: on the one hand, he is brilliant, innovative and daring; on the other hand, he seems to delight in deception and sleight of hand, particularly in the way that he revisits, and arguably transvalorizes, theoretical discourse reminiscent, inter alia, of poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this paper, we wish to reveal the double-sidedness of Bayard's new detective criticism in order to see how his new solutions to classic crime texts carry within themselves clues to their own undoing as well as alternative solutions that can be deemed to have been sown consciously or unconsciously into the weave of Bayard's analysis. This is the irony of Bayard's criticism: it references the work by reverting to a study of the text while keeping both, work and text, in view and, effectively, by being both, that is, by exposing the textuality of canonical literary works and presenting his criticism as transparently readable, even as 'easy reading', he offers his ideas as works, which the reader can read as such but can also reread, à la Pierre Bayard, as text. Rather surprisingly, there has not been much scholarly response to Bayard's prolific excursions into literary criticism. To date, Bayard has written some twenty-one monographs, including sixteen in Éditions de Minuit's famous 'Paradoxe' collection, which has been marketed with huge success to a general as well as an academic audience. While he is a Professor of French Literature at Paris VIII, his work, which he sees as primarily concerned Comparative Literature Studies 53.1 (2016): 150-169. with the "undecidability" of literary text i and its relationship to psychoanalysis (he is also a practicing psychoanalyst), strays beyond the typical parameters of literary analysis as practiced in France, taking on a comparative edge that would see it equally at home in the French discipline of la littérature comparée. Reaction to his works tends to be limited to praise for their ability to reach out to the broader public and, thereby, to take literary criticism to the masses. Warren Motte, for example, finds "particularly refreshing", even "ludic" this ability to "[pique] the interest of readers well beyond the limited circle of those who habitually consume French criticism and literary theory" and thus to "expand the horizon of possibility of critical writing in significant ways". ii This playful aspect of Bayard's criticism is also picked up by Philippe Roger, who notes that "[i]f there is something 'generational' about Bayard's work, it might be just this: his distaste for academic 'seriousness' and his belief in a calculated disorientation (of the reader) as the best compass by which to charter his own critical journey". iii Jack Abecassis, for his part, lauds the presentation of Bayard's arguments in their "attractive and readable package full of levity and playfulness, always skirting the line between humorous irony and serious argumentation". iv If Bayard the ironist has a sincere ambition, it is, for Abecassis, for "cu...

This article explores the link between the novel and the passport system as one of the defining legal institutions of modernity. The late eighteenth-century introduction of modern strategies for controlling mobility brought about a reconfiguration of political space which was now no longer freely travelable, but crisscrossed by internal and international borders. This process is crucial in terms of the history of the novel because it undid the nexus of space, mobility, and narrative characteristic of the early-modern novel and forced the genre to invent plots that better aligned with the reality of modern movement control. Taking a first step towards a literary history of movement control, this comparative study identifies three successive modalities of the novel/passport interface via readings of exemplary literary works: Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg (1731–43), Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) as compared to Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), and Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).

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