“Polarities within an Entity”: The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001)

The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-ficti...

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Bibliografske podrobnosti
izdano v:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/angles,
Glavni avtor: Mergenthal, Silvia
Format: Article ou chapitre numérique
Jezik:Anglais
Izdano: Angles 2023
Teme:
Online dostop:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Opis
Izvleček:The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-fictional literature, and inscribed in the Edinburgh cityscape. It is also commodified so as to attract the international tourist trade. Using as its prime example Ian Rankin’s 2001 Rebus novel The Falls, this paper sketches the cultural history of one notorious criminal case, that of William Burke and William Hare. In particular, it discusses the spatio-temporal referentiality of texts about Burke and Hare and situates them in the wider context of the Scottish literary tradition.