About the lecture

In this lecture, we look into the origins of crime writing, specifically focusing on: (i) how crime writing can be considered to have roots dating back to Sophocles' play "Oedipus Rex," where Oedipus functions as both detective and criminal, (ii) how Shakespeare's Hamlet can be considered as an early form of crime writing or detective fiction due to its exploration of murder, usurpation, and plots, (iii) how Hamlet as a play considers the limits of the representation of a murder, and (iv) the concern that Hamlet as a play has with surveillance, and how that is mirrored in the concerns of more modern crime writing.

About the lecturer

Dr Christopher Pittard joined the University of Portsmouth in 2009, having held previous teaching positions at Newcastle University and the University of Exeter. His main research focus is on the popular culture of the nineteenth century, especially the emergence of popular genres in the Victorian fin de siecle and detective fiction in particular. His monograph, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, considers how such fictions (and the periodicals in which they appeared) engaged with ideas of material and social purity, ranging from Sherlock Holmes cleaning the face of criminality in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” to the moral policing carried out by the Social Purity movements and late Victorian antivivisection campaigns. His publications in this area include discussions of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, and of the Strand Magazine more widely.