Corsican Crime Fiction: A Shifting Landscape

By Clara Sitbon

This Element brings to light crime fiction from Corsica, a French-administered Mediterranean island with a distinct language, culture, and history of political resistance. It proposes that Corsican crime narratives engage with crime fiction conventions not through straightforward adoption or rejection, but through subtle negotiation. It argues that language operates as a political and performative act, that islandness structures narratives from within rather than serving as a geographical backdrop, and that Corsican crime fiction mounts a sustained epistemological, political, and moral challenge to crime fiction's assumptions about authority, knowledge, and justice. Ultimately, it asks whether Corsican crime fiction might, conditionally, be understood as a decolonial form, and calls for an archipelagic framework through which island crime fiction across the Francophone world and beyond might be read in dialogue with one another, rather than in relation to a metropolitan centre.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1009650351
• ISBN13: 9781009650359
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 75 Pages