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Cover image of The Mystery to a Solution
Cover image of The Mystery to a Solution
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The Mystery to a Solution

Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story

John T. Irwin

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Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society

In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics...

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society

In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, the mind-body problem, the etymology of the word labyrinth, and dozens of other topics. Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story—the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.

Reviews

Reviews

This is a fine book... Irwin has travelled far and profitably, indeed, into the history of chess, into geometry and algebra, into mythology, into alchemy, into the culture of labyrinths, and more besides.

[Irwin] has probed the labyrinthine depths principally of Poe and Borges, using the analytic tools of Jung, Lacan, and Derrida, and a score of other psychological interpreters of fiction... The result is dazzling.

[A] learned, capacious, and ultimately amazing book.

John Irwin has written another wonderful book.

A masterful blend of literary criticism, philosophy, game theory, classical learning, the history of science, and the occult.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
512
ISBN
9780801854668
Illustration Description
7 halftones
Author Bio
John T. Irwin
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John T. Irwin

John T. Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he formerly served as chair of the Writing Seminars. His previous books include The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.