«Spanish Noir»: towards a Literary Understanding of Genre (on the Example of the Novel «Todo esto te daré» by D. Redondo)

The theoretical orientation of the article pursues a practical purpose: to embed a sample of contemporary Spanish crime literature in the genre framework and to be able to apply the results obtained in this type of works. The issue of genre attribution in crime literature has not yet been resolved due to the different starting points of numerous approaches: genre genesis, national specifics, gender perspective, stylistics, etc. Our hypothesis consists in the possibility of attributing any sample of modern criminal literature to a certain genre on the basis of unified literary parameters regardless of the national origin of the work. The artistic analysis of Dolores Redondo’s novel «Todo esto te daré» (2016) on the basis of the genre-typological method – is preceded by theoretical sections. In the introduction, the expediency of this study in the light of the influence of publishing practices on the literary component itself is substantiated. The issue of genre determination is often distorted for the sake of commercial success, depriving researchers of the possibility of scientific analysis using unified terms. Turning directly to the subject of the study, we offer a short excursion into the history of Spanish crime literature and into the environment of scholarly reflection on the so-called «noir» – frequent, but lacking terminological nomination. The methodology proposed by N.N. Kirilenko and O.V. Fedunina becomes the main tool for analyzing the text. The consistent «filtering» of the novel through the constant structural features (type of hero, subject structure, chronotope, and compositional forms of speech) allows it to be attributed to the genre of “victim investigation” with some features of a police novel. The search for the genre of a work in a synchronic context is convenient and universal, therefore, firstly, it is applicable to almost all samples of modern criminal literature, and secondly, it can be complementarily combined with other research purposes. So, you can focus on the genesis of the genre or various factors influencing it in the past and present. In any case, for all the mobility and hybrid nature of contemporary crime literature, its samples can be classified according to uniform criteria, which significantly enriches the toolkit for further research.

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