SOURCE: Gillespie, Gerald. “The Romantic Discourse of Detection in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” In Fiction, Narratologie, Texte, Genre, edited by Jean Bessière, pp. 203-12. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

In the following essay, first published in a 1985 French language edition of Fiction, Narratologie, Texte, Genre, Gillespie observes that authorial interest in textual interpretation, evident in nineteenth-century detective stories and related genres, anticipated theories of interpretation developed in the twentieth century.

My limited purpose in this brief paper is to illustrate only some features of one aspect of the detective story, but an important aspect present in the first clear examples of this new genre which Romanticism bequeathed to the nineteenth century: the linkage between the discourse of detection and the problematics of text interpretation.

Since so many of E. T. A. Hoffmann's works involve us in elaborate labors of interrelated detection and interpretation, I shall reserve wider treatment of his...