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The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Storyby Irwin, John T
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Book DescriptionBaltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 1994 The mystery to a solution. 481pp including index, black and white photos, some underlining in the beginning of book, previous owner's stamp on inside cover and name and date on FEP, 8vo, very good. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Scholarly Book. Media Reviews"Professor Irwin has written, in a most engaging style, an expansive and compelling study of Poe and Borges. Poe's Dupin stories, both paradigmatic of analytic detective fiction and serious literature, are the ground for Irwin's exploration of the essential embrace of lucid anaysis and opaque mystery. His comments should be fascinating not only to scholars in the field, but to mystery writer and reader as well." -- Martha Grimes "A masterful blend of literary criticism, philosophy, game theory, classical learning, the history of science and the occult." -- Eric J. Sundquist Publisher NotesRecipient of Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award and the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, the mind-body problem, the etymology of the word labyrinth, and dozens of other topics. Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story--the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together."This is a fine book... Irwin has travelled far and profitably, indeed, into the history of chess, into geometry and algebra, into mythology, into alchemy, into the culture of labyrinths, and more besides."--John Sturrock, Times Literary Supplement "[Irwin] has probed the labyrinthine depths principally of Poe and Borges, using the analytic tools of Jung, Lacan, and Derrida, and a score of other psychological interpreters of fiction.... The result is dazzling."--Patrick H. Samway, America "[A] learned, capacious, and ultimately amazing book."--Virginia Quarterly Review "John Irwin has written another wonderful book."-- J. Hillis Miller "A masterful blend of literary criticism, philosophy, game theory, classical learning, the history of science, and the occult."-- Eric J. Sundquist When Poe invented the analytic detective genre in the 1840s with the three Dupin stories, his underlying project was to examine the very nature of self-consciousness. But the tradition of detective fiction these stories inspired would draw on only the most superficial aspects of his work. One hundred years after Poe, however, Borges would reinterpret the genre with three detective stories of his own and revive Poe's original, ambitious intention to analyze "the analytic power". In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the genre Poe created and the meaning of Borges's efforts to "double" its origin. Using a methodology that combines history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective genre into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, handedness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, automata, the mind-body problem, the etymology of labyrinth, and scores of other topics. Irwin honors the aesthetic impact of the genre he discusses by mirroring in his study the dynamics of a detective story - the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together. Other Recommended Books
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