Protagonist Curtis Dorgan was sitting on his front porch when a Sunset City mail truck delivered a letter from the Idea Salesman that would literally change his life. Suddenly thrust into an existence that never quite feels like his own, he finds himself playing the role of husband and father, and assumes a high-paying position at a downtown capping company. Disoriented and with very little knowledge of himself or the people around him he embraces his newfound life, is promoted at work, and finds himself quickly falling in love with his wife and children. But when an unknown villain invades Sunset City seeking the destruction of the Idea Salesman and begins wreaking havoc across town, with the help of a few hard-nosed detectives and some close friends, he slowly comes to learn the true reason behind his new life. Curtis Dorgan has been revised, and he has been called upon by the elusive Idea Salesman to live out his destiny and save the town from its newest and most dangerous threat. / by Daniel Kennard. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web. FboU

Thesis (M.A. (African Languages)) -- University of Limpopo, 2017 / The study is about the use of suspense in Tshivenḓa literature. It focuses on a few selected drama works of prominent authors in Tshivenḓa. In a nutshell the study shows a critical role that suspense plays in drama. It argues that without suspense, a drama will not be worth reading or watching. Ṱhoḓisiso iyi yo ḓitika nga ndeme ya u sia muyani kha maṅwalwa a Tshivenḓa. Nyombedzelo i ḓo vha kha kushumisele kwa ndeme kwa u sia muyani kha ḓirama dza vhaṅwali vho bvumaho kha Tshivenḓa. Ṱhoḓisiso ino i ima kha ḽa uri ḓirama i nga si takadze arali ha shaea tshiteṅwa tsha u sia muyani.

The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv.

The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Often hailed as “China’s Stephen King,” Chinese psychological suspense author Cai Jun occupies a position at the peak of the new wave of young authors flooding China’s popular literature market. In order to understand Cai’s popularity as an author, the impact his works and writing have on this market, and how he creates his particular brand of suspense fiction, it is both necessary to put his works into a larger context and analyze his writing. This thesis provides a brief overview of the recent literary scene in China, from the rise of internet literature and the comeback of genre fiction to the advent of mooks, the evolution of young adult literature, and the development of the author marketing industry, and also addresses the “pure vs. popular” controversy in China’s literary world, identifies how Cai fits into these trends, and determines who Cai is as a writer in terms of genre, story content, and literary reception through the translation and analysis of Cai’s short story “Kidnapped.”

In this dissertation, I present Dramatis, a computational human behavior model of suspense based on Gerrig and Bernardo's de nition of suspense. In this model, readers traverse a search space on behalf of the protagonist, searching for an escape from some oncoming negative outcome. As the quality or quantity of escapes available to the protagonist decreases, the level of suspense felt by the audience increases. The major components of Dramatis are a model of reader salience, used to determine what elements of the story are foregrounded in the reader's mind, and an algorithm for determining the escape plan that a reader would perceive to be the most likely to succeed for the protagonist. I evaluate my model by comparing its ratings of suspense to the self-reported suspense ratings of human readers. Additionally, I demonstrate that the components of the suspense model are sufficient to produce these human-comparable ratings.

Kwok Sze-Ki. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-138). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.v / Introduction The Genre of Detective Thriller --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One --- The Figure in the Carpet: Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd --- p.33 / Chapter Chapter Two --- """Thrillers are like life´ؤmore like life than you are"": Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear" --- p.68 / Chapter Chapter Three --- "Cultural and Metaphysical Mysteries: Paul Bowles's ""The Eye"" and Jorge Luis Borges's ""The Garden of Forking Paths""" --- p.99 / Concluding Remarks --- p.127 / Bibliography --- p.131