Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

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Crime story
(883 words)

The depiction of crime overrode boundaries of literary genre in the early modern period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was found in chronicles, collections of schwanks and anecdotes, in Bänkelsang, ballads, theater, and illustrated printed ephemera (cf. Picture story; cf. fig. 1). Crime stories were thus popular long before the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Friedrich Schiller, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others made them into a distinct form of novella or novel. The double sense of “story” as the Latin historia (“report of fact…

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Košenina, Alexander, “Crime story”, in: Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online, Editors of the English edition: Graeme Dunphy, Andrew Gow. Original German Edition: Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. Im Auftrag des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Instituts (Essen) und in Verbindung mit den Fachherausgebern herausgegeben von Friedrich Jaeger. Copyright © J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag GmbH 2005–2012. Consulted online on 19 March 2024 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2352-0272_emho_SIM_022792>
First published online: 2015
First print edition: 20170206



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