Fates of the Subversive Imagination: Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage (1868)

Event Date: 

Friday, February 28, 2014 - 9:00am to 12:15pm

Event Location: 

  • UCSB - Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
  • McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020)
  • Talk

Conference Title: American mysteries: Urban crime Fiction from Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris to the American Noir & Steampunk

Session/Panel: Urban Gothic? Poverty and Prostitution from Sue’s Mysteries of Paris to Lippard’s The Quaker City and Beyond

Talk Title: Fates of the Subversive Imagination: Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage (1868)

This conference focuses on the innovative genre of urban mysteries, which has been largely unexplored as a global cultural phenomenon. Starting with one of the first literary mass-successes, Eugène Sue’s serialized novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842-43 [The Mysteries of Paris]), the launch and reception of the urban mystery was one of the first occurrences of cultural globalization. In the months following the French publication, the novel was translated into several languages and gained international success from southern Europe to North America, from northern Europe to Latin America, Russia, and, finally, at the turn of the century, in Japan and China. Sue’s Mystères de Paris also initiated the production of hundreds of novels worldwide with considerable local variation, such as Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844-1848), Juan Martínez Villergas’s Los Misteríos de Madrid (1844), Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1847-48), Edouard Rivière’s Antonino y Anita ó los nuevos mysterios de Mexico (1851), Camilo Castelo Branco’s Os Mistéros de Lisboa (1854). Our UCSB mystery conference focuses on the translations, adaptations and transformations of the Parisian mystery novels in the United States, from George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844) and Edward Zane Carroll Judson [Ned Buntline]’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1847-48), to the influence this neglected popular genre had on the modern detective novel and the making of the film noir.