Studies in green: teaching ecological crime fiction

Part of the 'Teaching the New English' series.

Reading ecological crime fiction and reading crime fiction ecologically demands a shifting of focus to features of a text often dismissed backdrops to human activity: rivers, forests, landscapes, climate, or the planetary ecosystem. It provokes an adjustment of temporalities, urging students to situate human activity in seasonal, anthropological, evolutionary and deep time scales. Crime and detective fictions are inherently concerned with the ways in which ambiance, location, history and place-memory may be factors in crime and provide clues towards a mystery’s solution. Every crime novel is set somewhere, and investigation of that somewhere is a good place to start introducing students to wider questions posed by ecological reading. What forms of knowledge are best suited to excavating obscured histories of a landscape, and how are past transgressions built into the fabric of a place? Is the environment active or passive, and what kinds of relationships do characters and other agencies form with the world in which crimes are commissioned, investigated and solved? With these questions as starting points, students can be encouraged to think beyond the immediate and engaging human dramas of crime fiction, and to begin to explore the roles that other-than-human factors and agencies play in human transgressions and the process of detection.

• https://www.palgrave.com/br/book/9783319...