Literary creations of the past in vintage crime fiction at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries

Abstract

In the case of vintage crime fiction, the blurred affiliation to different cultural circulations derives from the problematisation of the image of the past employed in the construction of the narration. It cannot be considered within one of the two domineering artistic strategies typical for the description of the “past events”: apologetic or revisionist, both sharing the conviction that the cultural memory of a reader must be somehow altered. Thus, it is not without importance what readers of vintage crime fiction – as the consumers of cultural goods – really remember, how they do it, and most importantly – what is the purpose of the remembering. The above mentioned issues belong to three types of memory that are employed at the moment of reading: the prop room of the narration world; relation between the literary image and its correspondence, or lack of correspondence, with reader’s knowledge; and the functionalisation/instrumentalisation of memory. These three have been isolated in order to define, in a more transparent manner, various aspects of the core subject – that is, the presence of the past in texts of popular culture on the basis of vintage crime fiction.