Dr. DAVIES Ffion Mary Rose2025-09-032025-09-032023Davies, F. M. R. (3 Mar 2023). Tradition vs. mode: Genre hybridism in crime fiction. Captivating Criminality 9, Bangkok.https://captivatingcriminalitybangkok.wordpress.com/2023/02/18/abstracts/http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24915Whether existing as a police procedural television series, a dark domestic thriller film, or a journalistic true crime podcast, crime fiction continues to dominate the cultural imagination in its various manifestations despite its dubious reputation as a low-brow popular culture with little to no academic merit. Many of these iterations function within a diverse range of generic traditions. Yet, we must recognise that a set of established discursive codes are employed to allow these widely different manifestations to exist under the homologous identifier of crime fiction. It is my aim to suggest that these discursive codes are perhaps best articulated through conceptualising crime fiction not as a genre, but as a mode. In the adjacent field of Gothic studies, it has become a critical orthodoxy to conceptualise the Gothic literary tradition as a separate entity from the Gothic mode, the more fluid iterations which exist outside a particular historical and geographical location. This distinction allows space for the more compounded nature of the Gothic, with both intertextual and intercultural complexity as well as cross-generic fluidity, and can be used to illuminate our understanding of crime fiction as both a generic tradition as well as a pervasive mode. I will argue that it is useful to consider crime writing in a manner similar to Fred Botting in his seminal text, The Gothic (1996), ‘as a mode that exceeds genre and categories, restricted neither to a literary school nor to a historical period’ (9). Like Botting’s Gothic, I will argue that crime fiction is ‘a hybrid form, incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing’ (9). This paper suggests that a separation between the tradition of crime fiction and crime as a mode is necessary in order to fully comprehend its generic hybridity and complexity.enConference Paper