Umberto Eco (Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction)
Contribution
“The whodunit par excellence,” Tzvetan Todorov has written, “is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one which conforms to them.” By such measure, Umberto Eco’s one detective novel fails insofar as it brilliantly transgresses the very rules it exploits. Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983) extends detective fiction well beyond its usual boundaries without surrendering any of its readability. It is at once popular and literary, accessible and erudite, innocent yet self-consciously postmodernist. In...
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