Romantic and Realistic foundations of detective fiction: A comparative study of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The concrete objective of this study is to comprehend and analyze the historical flourishing and social contexts of the rise and the reasons of this rise of the genre of detective fiction in 19th century England through tracing and examining the appearance, construction, improvement and changing nature of this genre in this century.It attempts to be a comparative analysis between two different authors and some of their works. The authors are: Edgar Allan Poe, who is considered as the father figure in the early nineteenth century and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the follower of Poe in the late Victorian Era, which is the era of scientific and industrial advances. The present thesis focuses on detective fiction as a literary genre, investigates the concept, the origins and historical process of developing of the genre of detective fiction in the nineteenth century through making a critical comparison between Poe, who stresses on the the examination of emotions and employing imagination and Doyle, who stresses on scientific reasoning and the method of deduction. Edgar Allan Poe gave birth to the genre of detective story telling, popularized through his character Auguste Dupin; who is considered as the first detective character to exhibit the disciplines of deduction and logical thinking in unravelling the mysteries and crimes that plague society; Conan Doyle?s fictional detective character, well-known Sherlock Holmes, also displayed analogous characteristics.The intention of this research is to analyze how Poe in his Dupin tales and Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories reflected the Romantic and Realistic foundations of the nineteenth century detective fiction tradition.Keywords: Detective, Realistic, Detective Fiction, Romantic, The Victorian Era.