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Detective Fiction and Historical Narrative1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Extract

We know that Cicero successfully defended Sextus Roscius on a charge of parricide in 80 B.C.; we know that Vespasian became emperor after the civil wars of A.D. 69, and founded the Flavian dynasty which ended with his son Domitian's death in A.D. 96.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1999

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References

Notes

2. Roman Blood (Ivy Books, 1991), 274Google Scholar.

3. Todorov, Tzvetan, ‘Detective Fiction’ in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell U.P., 1977), 46Google Scholar.

4. Cf. Jenkins, Keith, On ‘What is History?’: from Can and Elton to Rorty and White (London, 1995), 6496Google Scholar; esp. 85–90.

5. Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory (Cambridge U.P., 1997), 12 (the figure is originally ‘…Dorothy's scarecrow, lamenting his lack of a brain while performing at the level of a wily and inventive pragmatism…’)Google Scholar.

6. Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1976), 182Google Scholar. Marlowe is, of course, named for Shakespeare's contemporary, the playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe.

7. Todorov, , op. cit, 47–8Google Scholar.

8. Davis, Lindsey, The Silver Pigs (Pan Books, 1989), 63Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 241.

10. Ibid., 63.

11. Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (London, 1992), 150Google Scholar.

12. Op. cit., 177.

13. Op. cit., 149. Cf. Žižek, , op. cit., 150–3, 187Google Scholar.

14. Roman Blood, 5.

15. Sulla's words: ‘Are you really so proud to be their champion, Cicero, to have saved a bloody parricide just so you could kick me in the balls, all in the name of old-fashioned Roman virtue?’ (Roman Blood, 374).

16. The Silver Pigs, 249.

17. Ibid., 164.

18. Ibid., 241.

19. Pliny, , Panegyric of Trajan 48.3Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 90.5.

21. All following quotations are from The Silver Pigs, 241.

22. Suet. Dom. 3.1.