Jessica Gildersleeve

Bio

Jessica Gildersleeve is Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of eight books, including Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (2014), Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought, and Things (2019, with Patricia Juliana Smith) and, most recently, Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand: Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television (2022, with Kate Cantrell).

Contributions

Commemorating Forgetting: 1922 and Golden Age Detective Fiction

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

Detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, the genre’s “Golden Age,” is concerned with a desire to mitigate the moral injustices of the war, symbolized by the solution of the crime and the resolution of the narrative. In order to do this, Golden Age detective fiction avoids graphic or explicit depictions of violence and death even as its plots are primarily concerned with murder; as Alison Light puts it, “fleshiness, either figuratively or literally, was … in gross bad taste after the butchery...

Tags:

commemoration crime fiction