Original scientific paper
How the Czech Crime Fiction Was Tempered? The Art of the Crime Fiction by Jan Cigánek and the “New” Crime Fiction of the 1960s
Matija Ivačić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
In the multifaceted and poetically diverse nineteen-sixties in the Czech literature, during which its exile from the official literary communication lasted for almost a decade, the Czech crime fiction gained sway in quality and quantity and two basic models of crime fiction emerged: the pro-western and the socialist novel. The article analyses the book The Art of the Crime Fiction from 1962 by Jan Cigánek, a Marxist critic and literary scholar, as the most significant and consistent contribution to the Czech Marxist criticism's theoretical definition of the “new” socialist crime fiction model. Particular attention is given to some of the key implications of Cigánek’s thoughts on crime fiction, such as the demand for realism and the more social characterization of the protagonist, or the emphasis on the extrinsic (social) functions that the “new” crime fiction had to perform in a socialist social environment.
Keywords
Czech literature; Jan Cigánek; The Art of the Crime Fiction; socialist crime fiction
Hrčak ID:
188604
URI
Publication date:
3.10.2017.
Visits: 1.293 *