Luc Boltanski notices the contemporaneity, in the late nineteenth century, of detective fiction with the first instances of ‘paranoia’ as a psychiatric condition defined by Emil Kraepelin in 1899 and observes that ‘[t]he investigator in a detective story thus acts like a person with paranoia, the difference being that he is healthy’ (2014: 15).
[…]
Luc Boltanski argues for a connection between the modern academic disciplines and nineteenth-century genre fiction, and links detective and espionage fiction to how sociology ‘challenges apparent reality and seeks to reach a reality that is more hidden, more profound and more real’ (2014: 30). His is one of several arguments that the emergence of conspiracies corresponds to the rise of modern societies (see also Koselleck 1988). Rita Felski diagnoses literary and critical theory’s determination to penetrate false appearances as the institutionalisation of suspicion in academic practices; of particular influence has been the engagement of literary critics (new historicists especially) with nineteenth-century literature, notably the realist novel, which is ‘charged with fraudulence and fabrication, with masking social contradictions by pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes’ (2015: 95). In these various ways, the nineteenth century produced the modern, suspicious reader.
– ‘Genres of conspiracy in nineteenth-century British writing’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), pp. 416-7
Even so, [author of ‘The Battle of Dorking’ George T.] Chesney adopted the distinctive time-stamp of the conspiracy narrative, which [Richard] Hofstadter summarises when he writes that the conspiracy theorist is always convinced that ‘he lives at a turning point’ (1966: 30). The conspiracy theory consistently calls for measures to be taken in the present to counteract forces that, while still latent, threaten the immediate future of the social order – or, in the case of invasion fiction, the nation-state.
– Ibid., p. 418
Boltanski, L. (2014) Mysteries and conspiracies: detective stories, spy novels and the making of modern societies, 1st edn., Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Felski, R. (2015) The limits of critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hofstadter, R. (1966) ‘The paranoid style in American politics’, in R. Hofstadter (ed.) The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 3-40.
Koselleck, R. (1988) Critique and crisis: enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society, Oxford: Berg.