Student Number: 0307561M Master of Arts School of Literature and Language Studies Faculty of Humanities / In this study I will interrogate some of the issues and contradictions raised by Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels. These texts feature a black African woman protagonist in a developing society, and have achieved huge popular and commercial success, but they are written by a white European man. I will examine briefly whether the books can be considered as ‘African Literature,’ and how the author has negotiated the interface between history and literature to convince readers and critics in ‘the West’ that he is portraying ‘the real Africa.’ I will investigate the strategies used by the author to create this ‘authentic’, ‘traditional’ effect, how he writes convincingly as, about and on behalf of women, and the use he makes of the detective fiction mode. Ultimately I will consider whether these novels represent a restorative ‘writing back’ or whether they constitute a continuing appropriation of African history, culture and identity, a further re-invention of Africa by and for ‘the West’.

This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society.<br><br> This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature.<br><br> With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader&#39;s ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers. / Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen die Detektivserien der afroamerikanischen Autorinnen Barbara Neely und Valerie Wilson Wesley. Die Blanche White Mysteries von Neely und die Tamara Hayle Mysteries von Wesley repräsentieren mit der Einführung der schwarzen Hausangestellten Blanche White als Amateurdetektivin und der schwarzen Privatdetektivin Tamara Hayle nicht nur hinsichtlich der innerhalb der letzten zwanzig Jahre erschienen Welle von Kriminalautorinnen mit weiblichen Detektiven eine Innovation, sondern auch bezüglich der mit diesen Hauptfiguren verbundenen Auseinandersetzungen mit Klassenstatus und Rassismus.<br><br> Die bisher erschienen Detektivromane beider Serien werden in dieser Arbeit im Hinblick auf ihre Präsentation der Erfahrungen der Afroamerikaner in den USA der 1990er Jahre untersucht. Da Detektivromane der Populärliteratur zugerechnet werden und entsprechend ihrer Befriedigung von Massenansprüchen &quot;produziert&quot; werden, war die Fragestellung, ob in den genannten Detektivserien diese Hinwendung zur Mainstreamkultur mit einer verringerten Darstellung der afroamerikanischen Probleme und Lebensweise verbunden ist. Bei der Analyse der Serien wurde deshalb der Entwicklung der Protagonistinnen als Detektivinnen und als schwarze Frauen sowie der Wirkung ihrer Erzählerstimme besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt.<br><br> Die beiden Serien repräsentieren die afroamerikanische Kultur auf unterschiedlichen Erfahrungsstufen, woran erkennbar ist, dass die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung in den USA keine homogene Gruppe darstellt. Ausschlaggebend für das Erreichen des Anspruchs der Afroamerikaner an ihre Literatur scheint die Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Identitätsfindung der schwarzen Protagonistinnen und der Beziehungen zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen zu sein. Den Autorinnen gelingt es in unterschiedlichem Maße den weißen und somit Mainstream-Lesern nicht nur einen Einblick in ihre Kultur zu vermitteln, sondern vielmehr, sie direkt mit ihrer Ignoranz gegenüber dieser schwarzen Kultur zu konfrontieren. Neelys und Wesleys große Leistung ist, dass die Stimmen ihrer Protagonistinnen sowohl ein zahlreiches schwarzes als auch ein wachsendes weißes Publikum erreichen.

Plötsligt en dag står de där, mitt i centrum för arbetslivets ‘förnyelse’. Räddarna i den postmoderna nöden och den nya ekonomins frälsare: De kreativa människorna. Företagsledare, forskare och politiker tar dem till sina hjärtan. Med stor självklarhet ges de utrymme i maktens korridorer. Men vilka är de egentligen? Var kommer de ifrån? Vad vill de? Vart är de på väg? Och varför är de så hett eftertraktade? Trots att de verkar vara på allas läppar är det ingen som riktigt vet. De är gäckande och undflyende, som mystiska fantomer hämtade ur religionens, konstens och känslans värld. Med ett signalement över den kreativa människan, framvaskat ur kreativitetens idéhistoria, ledtrådar sig författaren in i kunskapens och kreativitetens labyrinter. På spaning efter kreativitetens osynliga orsaker och o(av)sedda konsekvenser leder spåren till en början in i mediavärlden och mot det kreativa ledarskapet. Men snart nog tätnar intrigen. Från redaktionsmötena på en affärstidning, via ett porträtt av en av landets mäktigaste chefredaktörer, till turerna kring tillsättandet av en ny VD för Sveriges Television, väver den röda tråden ett förbryllande mönster. Vad är det, förutom kreativitet, som förenar en rådgivare till den danska regeringen med styrelseordföranden för Aftonbladet? Vad sammanlänkar Dramatenchefen och en reklambyrå-VD med Platon? Vad har den nye SVT-chefen gemensamt med Sherlock Holmes? Vad har reportrarna på Finanstidningen med Karl Marx att göra? Och vilken betydelse har Kungsgatan 18 i sammanhanget? Upplösningen blir allt annat än prydlig. Offer blir till gärningsmän, gärningsmän blir till offer och i skuggan av den ‘logiska’ intrigen lurar en annan. Avhandlingen döljer en komplott. Men en skenbar sådan. Den akademiska deckaren är inte vad den synes vara. Logiken är bruten. Ledtrådarna finns överallt. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2001

This dissertation proposes a theoretical examination of the Latin American thriller through the framework of post-dictatorial Chile, with a concluding look at the post civil war Central American context. I define the thriller as a loose narrative structure reminiscent of the basic detective story, but that fuses the conventional investigation formula with more sensational elements such as political violence, institutional corruption and State terrorism. Unlike the classic form, in which crime traditionally occurs in the past, the thriller form engages violence as an event ongoing in the present or always lurking on the narrative horizon. The Chilean post-dictatorial and Central American postwar histories contain these precise thriller elements. Throughout the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990), the Central American civil wars (1960s-1990s) and the triumph of global capitalism, political violence emerges in diversified and oftentimes subtle ways, demanding new interpretational paradigms for explaining its manifestation in contemporary society. In Chile, however, despite a history ripe with the narrative elements of the thriller, a consistent thriller novelistic tradition remains underdeveloped. My research reveals that contemporary Chilean ? and by extension, Latin American ? fiction continues to be analyzed under the aegis of melancholy and the tragic legacy of dictatorship or revolutionary insurgency. Therefore, a theoretical examination of the post-dictatorial/postwar thriller answers the need to not only move beyond previously established literary and political paradigms toward a more nuanced engagement with the present, but to envision a form of thinking beyond national tragedy and trauma. This dissertation analyzes samples of the post-dictatorial detective narrative and testimonial account, which constitute the mirroring narrative components of the thriller. The detective texts and testimonial writings analyzed in this project demonstrate how the particular use of the detective story and testimonial account mirror one another at every fundamental level, articulating what I am theorizing as the thriller structure. Using the theoretical approximations of John Beverley, Brett Levinson, Alberto Moreiras, Jon Beasley-Murray, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt and Carlo Galli, this project makes an original inquiry into why the thriller emerges as the most apt narrative framework for exploring the forms of violence in present-day Latin America.

La tesi ripercorre le linee di sviluppo del genere poliziesco nella televisione italiana e americana per coglierne i tratti fondamentali e le tendenze in termini di formati, strategie narrative ed evoluzione dei contenuti. In seguito si analizza nel dettaglio il caso della serie Distretto di Polizia, dall'ideazione fino alla sua evoluzione nei sei anni della messa in onda, con particolare attenzione al confronto con i precedenti modelli di racconto italiani e stranieri. La tesi si concentra poi sui diversi modelli di organizzazione del lavoro creativo legati ad alcuni dei maggiori titoli seriali italiani, individuando pregi e limiti di ogni struttura in rapporto alle esigenze produttive e alle particolarità di formato e mantenendo per quanto possibile valido il confronto con analoghi team autoriali americani. / The first part of the research goes over the lines of development of the detective story's genre in Italian and American TV, grasping its fundamental traits and tendencies in terms of formats, narrative strategies and contents' evolution. The following chapters focus on a case study. TV show Distretto di Polizia is an excellent example of this crime story series; this TV series is examined from the moment of the creation trough the six years of its broadcasting, focusing especially on the confrontation with the previous Italian and foreign story models. The last part of the research presents the different models of internal organisation of the creative work teams responsible for the most important titles among Italian TV shows. The aim of the research is to grasp the advantages and the limits of each model in relation to the different production requirements and the special characters of the various formats, trying to confront, as often as possible, the Italian management models with similar American models.

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2018-08-15T13:54:04Z No. of bitstreams: 1 pabloitaboraydecarvalho.pdf: 4526356 bytes, checksum: 82e2ce191766b7426d065142ec7fc9f5 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-08-15T14:20:45Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 pabloitaboraydecarvalho.pdf: 4526356 bytes, checksum: 82e2ce191766b7426d065142ec7fc9f5 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T14:20:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 pabloitaboraydecarvalho.pdf: 4526356 bytes, checksum: 82e2ce191766b7426d065142ec7fc9f5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-06 / O objetivo principal deste trabalho foi analisar uma estratégia de ampliação de repertório do jovem leitor que consiste em usar o jogo de tabuleiro Scotland Yard e a série televisiva Sherlock como mediadores no processo de apropriação de estratégias literárias usadas na narrativa policial clássica. Foi concebido no âmbito do Profletras-UFJF, como parte do projeto Intertextualidade no polissistema literário: uma proposta de ampliação do repertório do jovem leitor desenvolvido pela professora Elza de Sá Nogueira. O embasamento teórico é constituído pelos conceitos de letramento literário (Cosson e Paulino); de repertório (Iser); de polissistema literário (Even-Zohar); de adaptação (Hutcheon); de comunidade de leitores (Chartier); de jogo (Huizinga); e de narrativa policial (Todorov). Foi aplicado numa turma de 9o ano de uma escola pública federal de Juiz de Fora, utilizando a metodologia da pesquisa-ação. A partir do diagnóstico – elaborado com base na análise de questionários aplicados na turma em questão – de que a maioria dos alunos lê apenas os livros exigidos pela escola e, portanto, não inserem a literatura em suas vidas num sentido mais amplo, formulamos a hipótese de que, por meio do jogo e da narrativa audiovisual, a inserção dos alunos numa comunidade de leitores seria mais efetiva, e a ampliação de repertório se realizaria como fruição estética. Na sequência da proposta, foi realizada a leitura compartilhada (conforme recomendada por Tereza Colomer) de um romance e cinco contos de Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, durante a qual foram usadas, como estratégias, questões mediadoras propostas pelo professor e o registro das discussões no diário de leitura por parte dos alunos. A apropriação das estratégias aprendidas foi avaliada através da elaboração coletiva de um jogo de tabuleiro similar ao Scotland Yard, que contou com a adaptação dos contos lidos em sala de aula. Os resultados comprovaram a hipótese, afinal percebeu-se que os alunos, além de se apropriarem das estratégias literárias e terem se inserido numa comunidade de leitores, tiveram maior fruição estética na leitura dos textos literários propostos. / The main objective of this work was to annalyze a strategy to broaden young readers' repertoire, consisting in using Scotland Yard's board game and television series Sherlock as mediators in the process of appropriation of literary strategies used in classic detective fiction. It was conceived within Profletras-UFJF, as part of the project "Intertextualidade no polissistema literário: uma proposta de ampliação do repertório do jovem leitor" (Intertextuality in literary polysystem: a proposal to expand young readers' repertoire) developed by Professor Elza de Sá Nogueira. The theoretical basis is constituted by the concepts of literary literacy (Cosson and Paulino); repertoire (Iser); literary polysystem (Even-Zohar); adaptation (Hutcheon); community of readers (Chartier); game (Huizinga); and detective fiction (Todorov). It was applied to a 9th grade class in a federal public school on Juiz de Fora, using research-action method. After diagnostics - based on the analysis of questionnaires applied to the referred class - that most of the students only read books required by the school, therefore not inserting literature in their lives on a broader sense, we formulate the hypothesis that inserting students into a community of readers would be more effective through game and audiovisual narrative, and repertoire expansion would be performed as aesthetic enjoyment. Following that proposal, there was a shared reading of a novel and five short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as recommended by Tereza Colomer), during which were used as strategies some mediatorial questions proposed by the teacher and the registry of those discussions by students on their reading journals. The appropriation of strategies learned was evaluated through collective elaboration of a board game similar to Scotland Yard, which counted on adaptation of stories read in the classroom. The results proved our hypothesis, after all it was noticed that students, beyond appropriating literary strategies and entering a community of readers, had greater aesthetic enjoyment when reading the proposed literary texts.

In my thesis, I examine the discursive space of the detective fiction genre following Kasai Kiyoshi's periodization in his two-volume seminal work Tantei shosetsuron (The Theory of Detective Fiction, 1998). I investigate how Japanese detective fiction has developed in relation to Japan's modernization, industrialization, nationalism, and globalization, specifically in the 1920s-30s, the 1950s-60s, and from the 1990s to present. By historicizing the discursive formation of the genre in decisive moments in Japanese history, I examine how Japanese detective fiction delineated itself as a modern popular literature differentiating itself from serious literature (junbungaku) and also from other genres of popular fiction (taishu bungaku). My study exposes the socio-political, cultural and literary conditions that conditioned the emergence of the detective fiction genre as a problematic of Japanese society, stitching fantasy and desire for the formation of the national subject in the cultural domain. I investigate the dynamics through which Japanese detective fiction negotiates its particularity as a genre differentiating itself from the Western model and domestically from the conventional crime stories of the Edo and Meiji periods. Chapters One through Three of my study examine Japan's socio-cultural contexts after the Russo-Japanese war, specifically magazine culture and the rise of the detective fiction genre (Chapter I), the I-novel tradition and its relation to the genre (Chapter II), and representations of Tokyo as an urban center, focusing on Edogawa Ranpo's "Inju" (Beast in the Shadows, 1928) (Chapter III). Chapters Four through Six investigate the socio-cultural contexts after World War II, especially Japan's democratization in the 1950s-60s and the rearticulation of the genre through repeated debates about authenticities in Japanese detective fiction (Chapter IV), and the transition from tantei shosetsu (detective fiction) to suiri shosetsu (mystery) focusing on Yokomizo Seishi's Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murder Case, 1946) and Matsumoto Seicho's Ten to sen (Points and Lines, 1957) as representative works of the two trends (Chapter V), and finally the postmodern "return" to the prewar tradition in the 1990s (Chapter VI).

L. T. Meade's Avaricious Anomaly: Madame Sara, British Imperialism, and Greedy Wolves in The Sorceress of the Strand. Laurie Langlois Denning, Department of English, BYU Master of Arts. Critics interested in the prolific late Victorian author L.T. Meade have primarily focused on her work as an author of girls' stories and novels for young people, which enjoyed fantastic commercial success in her lifetime but fell into obscurity after her death. Recent scholarship on her detective fiction shows Meade's significant contributions to the genre as well as her engagement with social and political discourse. Scholars have noted ways that Meade's popular series, The Sorceress of the Strand, contributes to the New Woman debate and expresses anxiety over the British imperial project. This project examines Meade's villain in the series as a social anomaly that functions to interrogate the greed at the heart of imperialism. Examining the series' conclusion and the unusual nature of its ending sheds new light on Meade's contribution to debate over empire at the fin de siécle. Meade's fascinating villain, Madame Sara, is doggedly pursued by two detective figures--one is considered the top forensic specialist in the British police force and the other is the head of a business fraud agency--but the detectives are never able to bring Madam Sara to justice. Instead, it is a wolf that finally defeats the brilliant criminal mastermind. Why a wolf? Madam Sara's unusual demise serves as a deus ex machina that invites the reader to consider the Dante symbolism embedded in the text. Other critics see Meade's ending as reinforcing the empire; however, given the Dante imagery that has Madam Sara symbolizing a greedy imperial force, Meade's series indicts imperial greed and warns British citizens about failure to apprehend the evil in empire.