Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture

The Author: Stephen Wilkinson (1956) is a journalist, writer and academic who specialises in the study of Cuba. He began travelling to Cuba in 1986 and visits the island annually. He has written on Cuban politics and economics as well as completing a Ph.D. on the subject of this book, Cuban detective fiction.

• Contents: The relationship between literature and society: a theoretical framework – Nationalism, Marxism and sacrifice: Cuban revolutionary ideology and the Cuban state – Ideology and intervention: understanding Cuban revolutionary cultural policy – Bad black men and comical Chinese: the Cuban detective narrative 1915-1959 – Justice beyond legality: the early development of the revolutionary Cuban crime novel – Socialist heroes and capitalist villains: the Cuban revolutionary crime genre 1971-1991 – The crash of the 1990s and the challenge to modernity: how crime narrative changes to ‘fit’ the times – Irony, paradox and temporality: Sartrean morality in Pasado perfecto – Critiques of sexual and political intolerance in the novel Máscaras and the film Fresa y chocolate – From existentialism to postmodernity: the aestethic of doubt in Vientos de cuaresma and Paisaje de otoño.

«Wilkinson's long-awaited study of detective fiction in Cuba will be celebrated by scholars who have been wondering just when his academic work would be available to the larger public.» (Sophie Lavoie, Belphégor)