Discussion Group: On the Trail of the Detective: Testing a New Comparative Methodology in World Literature

My doctoral project in Comparative Literature examines the earliest detective fiction of Japan and Argentina. The novel comparative axis between Asia and South America aspires not to transpacific studies but rather to a decentralised re-evaluation of literary networks between the West and the wider world. Emerging from the pages of Vidocq, Poe, Gaboriau and Conan Doyle, detective fiction spread rapidly in a self-referential chain that reached around the world. On close inspection, the earliest practitioners in Japan and Argentina display remarkable parallels despite limited direct contact. My research looks behind the canonical figures of these literatures (Jorge Luis Borges, Edogawa Ranpo) to focuses on the pioneers whose similarities have been hitherto unnoticed. Little examined in national scholarship, writers such as Kuroiwa Ruikō and Hamao Shirō (from Japan) have never before been read in conjunction with Luis Varela and Felix Alberto de Zabalía (from Argentina). Yet they reveal echoes in the narrative, translation and publishing practices of the genre that complicate a hegemonic literary history. These are acts of adaptation and resistance which demonstrate a complex relationship between crime narratives, modernity, and law enforcement.
 
Oliver Eccles is in the last year of his PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London. He completed a MA (also in Comparative Literature) at King's College London, and a BA in French and Spanish at New College, Oxford. The broad scope of his doctoral research has seen his academic interests range over narratology, memory studies, queer studies and translation studies. His research has been supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the British Association for Japan Studies and the  Literary Encyclopedia.