Stewart King
My interest in crime fiction centres on two main approaches. The first centres on crime fiction as a global genre and the second examines the relationship between crime fiction and national and cultural identities.
World crime fiction
I am particularly interested in how reading transnationally can foster a form of relational thinking that connects the local to the world and allows us to develop a global consciousness.
I am a pioneer in the emerging field of crime fiction as a world genre. In 2014 I published the seminal article in this field: “Crime Fiction as World Literature” (Clues 23.2), which has been described as “the most useful intervention in this […] field of study” (Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner, OUP 2016). In it, I propose a way of reading crime fiction beyond the traditional national foci to explore the international connections between writers and works from around the globe. The article, moreover, seeks to orient world literature studies towards a popular fiction genre and away from its traditional focus on classics of world literature. The article has been adopted as set reading in a number of crime fiction courses in Europe, Israel, the United States and Australia and it is currently being translated into Polish.
In this field, I have also published several articles, book chapters and a special issue of the journal Clues on the “Global Crime Scene” with Prof. Stephen Knight. A collection of essays, entitled Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Detective Fiction, which I am co-editing with Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls, will be published in 2019 by Liverpool University Press. On the strength of my work in this field, I have been invited to edit The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, which I am co-editing with Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal and Andrew Pepper. This book will appear in early 2020. My research on world crime fiction has also led to an invitation to join the editorial board of Clues, the most important international crime fiction journal.
Crime fiction in multinational and multicultural states
In addition to my research on world crime fiction, I am internationally recognised as a specialist on Spanish and Catalan crime fiction. My major contribution to this field has been to question the inherent Spanishness of “Spanish” crime fiction by exploring the ways in which writers use the genre’s conventions to articulate competing national and cultural identities in crime novels written in Castilian (Spanish) as well as Catalan, Galician and Basque. I have published over 20 articles or books in this field and I am currently completing a monograph, Detective Fiction from Spain: Murder in the Multinational State (Routledge, forthcoming).
Supervision
I have experience supervising HDR theses on crime fiction. I supervised Anna Jaquiery’s PhD thesis Immigrant Representations in Contemporary European Crime Fiction (2018) and I am currently supervising a PhD on the translation of Japanese crime fiction into English.
https://www.researchgate.net/project/World-Crime-Fiction
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Cultural-and-National-Identities-in-Crime-Fiction-in-Spain
Speak to Library staff about linking to issues of Clues or particular articles as well as to Anna Jaquiery’s thesis.