Introduction

Summary

The Introduction positions this book as part of the new critical move to map and interrogate crime fiction’s transnationality. The main point is to combine a sustained focus on individual texts and their particular local and national contexts with a broader, comparative approach that explores the ways in which the translation, circulation and reception of crime fiction within the Mediterranean basin produces a more complex portrait of the genre than would be possible if one just focused on national crime fictions as discrete entities. This chapter argues that by considering southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly giving each component equal significance, this book contributes to the debate about the Western and Eurocentric dimension of world literature. This introduction also argues that, for the relatively limited dimension of the region as opposed to the global, a regional approach is able to give close attention to particular languages and specific texts, while at the same time providing ‘peripheral literature’ with more critical mass and cultural power.