著者

金﨑 茂樹

雑誌

大阪産業大学論集 人文・社会科学編 = JOURNAL OF OSAKA SANGYO UNIVERSITY Humanities&Social Sciences (ISSN:18825966)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, pp.1-13, 2017-03

---

Psychic (occult or supernatural) detectives in fiction enjoy considerable popularity among the public readership. The first character of note is said to be “Dr. Martin Hesselius,” appearing in several stories published in 1872 by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, and the growth of the genre initially peaked between the late Victorian period and the 1930s. Academic study of the “Psychic Detective” novels, however, has been given much less attention than Gothic Literature or Horror fiction. This paper analyzes several characteristic aspects of this genre, through a discussion comparing it to Gothic novels, ghost stories, and the greater corpus of mainstream detective fiction.