POLARisation

The POLARization project aims to capture the rise in France between 1945 and 1989 of criminal narratives, which circulate in the heart of the social imagination, irrigated by the creative industries. The chosen chronological span is motivated by the profound transformations that have marked, in a little over 4 decades, the modes of production, distribution and consumption of these stories. Two apparently opposed phenomena emerge in particular during this historical sequence, inaugurated by the massive arrival of American fictions. On the one hand, the advent of television detective series may help explain, from the 1970s onwards, the gradual decline of a plethora of collections devoted to all variants of detective fiction. On the other hand, especially from the 1980s, a rapid legitimation of the black sub-genre took place, which modified the practices of publishing, writing and reading. The field of investigation will above all be that of printed criminal accounts published in France, examined in their entire generic and editorial spectrum. It will be important to implement a global and consequently multidisciplinary approach, which will contribute to a material and economic history of editorial supports, as well as to the examination of the progressive construction of a media architext of the genre. To do this, POLARization will exploit unpublished archives and draw on the resources of the digital humanities. However, in order to identify with precision the transmedia and transnational dynamic of criminal narratives, the role of actors in the print chain will be studied, thanks to the archives, in adaptation projects, whether radio or cinematographic or television; On the other hand, the French case will be clarified by comparison with the phenomena observed in emblematic collections in Italy and Spain.