Machinal, Hélène <br/><br/>
Origin, Identity, in Search of the Human in Contemporary Post-Cataclysmic Fiction 

 -  2012.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 50 
<br/><br/> Detective novels are usually anchored in the second half of the nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau and Arthur Conan Doyle. The genre emerged as a mode of compensation to the epistemological and ontological crisis triggered by new modes of representation of mankind’s origin and identity. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a new crisis of representation illustrated in the arts by postmodernism. This study aims at deciphering a generic, epistemological and symbolic heritage in contemporary English literature staging a post-cataclysmic and/or post-human world.