The Mysteries of Modern Life by Sara Hackenberg
Mystery fiction has long been regarded a conservative genre that focuses on crime, surveillance, and the restoration of disrupted social order. Such assessments, however, usually consider only a very small subset of works. We find a very different story if we consider the mysteries of modern life more widely, starting with the international, penny-press phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century city-mysteries narrative. Expanding and historicizing the genre in this way reveals diverse variants of popular mystery that emerged out of the city mysteries - up to and including the detective story - and that constitute an extraordinarily wide-ranging and socially radical genre. The paradoxical attitudes towards visual powers and problems at the heart of the modern mystery cultivates a form of master-perception concerned more with identification with than identification of and models forms of empathetic vision that work to challenge the very social hierarchies the genre has often been understood to uphold.
Sara Hackenberg is a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a Faculty member of the UC Dickens Project; board member of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies). She has published on Victorian visual culture, transatlantic serialized narrative, penny fiction, Chartist fiction, and early cinema.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781009604796 |
| ISBN 10 | 1009604791 |
| Title | The Mysteries of Modern Life |
| Author | Sara Hackenberg |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 2026-05-31 |
| Number of pages | 295 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |