Tropy autotematyczne w polskiej literaturze kryminalnej (rekonesans)

Crime fiction with self-referential accents function on the border of two spheres. Inspired by a pattern taken from pop culture, they are not addressed primarily to its consumers, but to supporters of solutions that break readers’ habits and conventionalised structures. The story structures are treated as pretexts. Thus, a critical reflection on the cultural conditions that influenced the emergence of these patterns becomes more important than the structures themselves. To make such shift of focus possible, the authors of criminal literature most often resort to one of the following three ways of subjecting the meta-literary issues: – using paratexts as markers of self-referentiality; – intentionally evoking ostentatiously conventionalised solutions, sometimes accompanied by self-referential comments; – intentionally going beyond the reader’s “horizon of expectations”. The above-mentioned strategies are not mutually exclusive solutions, thus sometimes their elements can be found in one literary piece. At the same time, distinguishing them allows us to notice the variety of self-referential tricks used by the authors of the stories “about crime and punishment”.