From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective

简介：历史背景本项目考察了世纪中期英国在大规模工业化所带来的交通革命和其他移动技术的背景下虚构的女侦探的出现。在这一时期，铁路改变了景观和人类生活的“运动速度”，规范了时间和活动的概念，并成为下一个世纪进步和“超现代性”的同义词（霍布斯鲍姆，153- 154）。这种“循环发酵”蔓延到出版业（弗里曼22）。1864年，观众对感觉和智力参与的需求有助于创造第一个文学“衬裙警察”，Paschal夫人和Mrs Gladden。尽管劳拉·马库斯（Laura Marcus）评论了铁路的到来与“侦探小说的新形式”（viii）之间的密切联系，但女性侦探，当地和全球交通网络以及文学流通之间的关系尚未完全绘制出来。通过查看1863年至1910年的9个英语和4个孟加拉语文本，我的项目将论证这些虚构的女主人公的构建与维多利亚时代的流动性文化密切相关。因此，本论文将提供一个在英国和英国海外领土的虚构侦探的存在详细检查。考虑到城市化和警察程序的同时发展，英国、澳大利亚和印度的大众媒体（特别是孟加拉语）成为一个有价值的来源，为同步阅读的三个地点，使女侦探成为追踪这些地区以及英国国内和殖民意识形态转变的重要渠道。研究问题和批判性调查尽管女侦探受到了相当多的关注，批判性的关注，基本的批判性的反应，往往以一种简单的方式看待体裁的最早的范例。最近的学术研究为女侦探的形象增加了一个新的维度，将其与新生的女权主义运动的联系历史化，并通过仔细研究女性凝视的激进潜力（Kestner）和《斯特兰德》（Clarke）等杂志的影响来扩大印刷市场。我的项目建立在这个以前的工作，但超越它描绘了女性侦探的意义，既作为整个大英帝国的女性自治的代表，又作为性别的占领和穿越国家和国际空间，除了阐明英国商品进口的某些方面，文本和技术进入殖民地。通过这些方式，它追溯了全球对国家的影响以及国家对全球的影响。因此，《从布赖顿到孟买》从一个新的角度探讨了流动性、女性和侦探小说之间的关系，在性别、阶级和种族三个更大的范围内提出了以下研究问题：1）交通技术如何促进了独特的阅读模式，它们在虚构的女侦探的诞生中扮演了什么角色？这些叙事是如何发展出新形式的女性身份和基于流动性的女性优势的？2)当这些文本和文字跨越国际界限时，它们是如何与发展中的跨国印刷网络和媒介化文化结合（或紧张）的？3)从伦敦到巴拉拉特，再到孟买/孟买，虚构的女侦探人物与不同阶层的实际妇女参与侦查形式的专业和移民机会有多大关系？

Introduction: Historical Background This project examines the emergence of the fictional female detective in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in the context of the transport revolution and other technologies of mobility engendered by large-scale industrialization. In this period the railways transformed the landscape and the very "speed of movement" of human life, standardizing notions of time and activity and becoming synonymous for the next century with progress and "ultra-modernity" (Hobsbawm 153-4). This "circulatory ferment" spilled over into the publishing industry (Freeman 22). The audience's demand for sensation and intellectual engagement was instrumental in the creation of the first literary "petticoated policewom(e)n," Mrs Paschal and Mrs Gladden, in 1864. Although Laura Marcus has commented on the intimate connection between the arrival of the railways and "the new form of the detective novel" (viii), the relationship between female detectives, local and global transport networks, and literary circulation has yet to be fully charted. By looking at 9 English and 4 Bangla texts, from 1863 to 1910, my project will argue that the construction of these fictitious heroines was closely linked to Victorian cultures of mobility. This dissertation will therefore offer a detailed examination of the presence of the fictional sleuth in Britain and in British territories overseas. Given contemporaneous developments in urbanization and police procedures, the popular press in Britain, Australia and India (particularly Bengal) becomes a valuable source for a synchronic reading of the three locations, making the female detective an important conduit for tracing shifts in the domestic and colonial ideologies in these territories as well as in Britain.Research Questions and Critical Survey Although the female detective has received considerable critical attention, foundational critical responses have tended to view the genre's earliest exemplars in a simplistic fashion. More recent scholarship has added a new dimension to the figure of the female detective, historicizing its connection to nascent feminist movements and expanding print markets by scrutinizing the radical potential of the female gaze (Kestner) and the influence of magazines such as The Strand (Clarke). My project builds on this previous work, but goes beyond it by delineating the significance of the female detective both as a representation of female autonomy across the British empire and as gendering the occupation and traversal of national and international spaces, in addition to shedding light on certain aspects of the import of British goods, texts, and technologies into colonies. In these ways, it traces the impact of the global on the national and of the national on the global. Thus, Brighton to Bombay explores the relationship between mobility, women, and detective fiction from a new angle, by posing the following research questions within three larger arcs of gender, class, and race: 1) How did transport technologies facilitate distinctive modes of reading, and what role did they play in the birth of the fictional female detective? How did these narratives develop new forms of female identity and interiority premised on mobility? 2) As these texts and characters crossed international lines, how were they transformed in combination (or tension) with developing transnational print networks and mediatized cultures? 3) How far did the fictional figure of the female detective engage with the professional and migratory opportunities of actual women of different classes involved in forms of detection, from London, through Ballarat, to Bombay/Mumbai?