THE EVOLUTION OF THE THRILLER GENRE IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN POPULAR LITERATURE: DAN BROWN AND THE RISE OF THE INTELLECTUAL CONSPIRACY THRILLER

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the thriller genre in American popular literature at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on the material of Dan Brown’s fiction. The study argues that Brown did not simply continue an existing commercial formula. He reconfigured the thriller into an “intellectual conspiracy thriller” in which danger is produced not only by pursuit, violence, and speed, but also by interpretation, code-breaking, religious controversy, and the collision of scientific and symbolic systems. The research combines genre analysis, narratological observation, and comparative reading of Brown’s novels from Digital Fortress through Origin. Particular attention is paid to the changing nature of suspense, the role of intertextual references, the use of historical and religious discourse, and the movement from localized institutional conflicts toward global civilizational anxieties. The findings show that Brown’s work registers a major shift in mass-market thriller writing: from the techno-political paranoia of the late twentieth century to transnational conspiratorial plots, and then to bioethical and technological scenarios characteristic of the twenty-first century. In this sense, Brown occupies an important place in the development of the contemporary American thriller as a hybrid, highly readable, and culturally resonant genre form.