Agatha Christie has never been substantially considered as a war writer, even though war is a constant presence in her writing. This interdisciplinary collection of essays considers the effects of these conflicts on the social and psychological textures of Christie’s detective fiction and other writings, demonstrating not only Christie’s textual navigation of her contemporary surroundings and politics, but also the value of her voice as a popular fiction writer reflecting popular concerns. Agatha Christie Goes to War introduces the ‘Queen of Crime’ as an essential voice in the discussion of war, warfare, and twentieth century literature.
The first specifically academic companion to contemporary scholarship on the work of Agatha Christie, this book includes chapters by an international group of scholars writing on topics and fields of study as various as ecocriticism and the anthropocene, popular modernism, middlebrow fiction, queer theory, feminism, crime and the state, and more. It addresses a broad selection of Christie's crime novels, as well as her short stories, literary novels written pseudonymously, and her own and others' dramatic adaptations for television, film, and the stage, Featuring unprecedented access to images and content held in Christie's personal archive, as well as a Foreword from renowned crime fiction writer Val McDermid, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Christie's work and legacy.
The undisputed "Queen of Crime," Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is the bestselling novelist of all time. As the creator of immortal detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, she continues to enthrall readers around the world and is drawing increasing attention from scholars, historians, and critics. But Christie wrote far beyond Poirot and Marple. A varied life including war work, archaeology, and two very different marriages provided the backdrop to a diverse body of work. This encyclopedic companion summarizes and explores Christie's entire literary output, including the detective fiction, plays, radio dramas, adaptations, and her little-studied non-crime writing. It details all published works and key themes and characters, as well as the people and places that inspired them, and identifies a trove of uncollected interviews, articles, and unpublished material, including details that have never appeared in print. For the casual reader looking for background information on their favorite mystery to the dedicated scholar tracking down elusive new angles, this companion will provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date information.
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.
Sleuthing Miss Marple mirrors the structure and playful analytic style of a detective novel. Beginning at the ‘scene of the crime’, this investigation places Agatha Christie and the clue-puzzle in historical context, casting light on the methods, the motives, and, in a sense, the alibis that underpin Christie’s crime fiction. In keeping with the clue-puzzle analytical method devised for this book, each chapter builds towards a conclusion that delivers a surprising intellectual payoff. This enquiry is unapologetically textual in approach. It constructs a rigorous evidence base drawn from the Marple short stories and novels, and presents a useful interpretation of crime fiction scholarship. This provides a foundation for original literary analyses that reveal Christie’s engagements with gender roles and genre rules, and the sleights of hand that they conceal. Christie’s modus operandi is uncovered, as are the narrative strategies and literary devices that she deployed to ambush unwary readers. Crucially, this investigation shows how Christie’s ingenious methods made it possible for an elderly spinster to get away with solving murder. Sleuthing Miss Marple will be invaluable for students and researchers of crime fiction, twentieth-century literature, and creative writing.
Agatha Christie has never been substantially considered as a war writer, though war is a constant presence in her writing. This interdisciplinary collection of essays introduces the 'Queen of Crime' as an essential voice in the discussion of war, warfare, and twentieth century literature.
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.
This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie’s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?
This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.
This book offers a pivotal re-evaluation of English teaching one century on from The Newbolt Report of 1921, responding to this seminal work and exploring its impact on issues and contemporary aims of English teaching today. Bringing together a range of experts in English higher education, the book provides a twenty-first century inflection on the enduring issues highlighted by Newbolt's original report. It examines topics including the demands of assessment, the narrowing of the literary curriculum, the impact of education reform, targets related to social mobility, class and widening participation, as well as broader questions about the function of literature and the arts in education. Chapters also consider issues surrounding the promotion of community cohesion, diversity and how technological advances might reshape literary education. This unique re-evaluation of the achievements and findings of the New bolt Commission will be essential reading for those researching English education and the history of education.
This volume seeks to weave applications of the dynamic concept of resonance to ethnic studies. Resonance refers to the ever broadening, multidirectional effects of movement or action, a concept significant for many disciplines. The individual chapters exchange the concept of static "intertextuality" for that of interactive "resonance," which encourages consideration of the mutual and processual influences among readings, paradigms, and social engagement in cultural analysis. International scholars of literary and cultural studies, linguistics, history, politics, or ethno-environmental studies contribute their work in this volume. Each chapter examines a specific ethnic phenomenon in terms of relevant literature, lived experience and theoretical approaches, or historical intervention, relating the given case study to parameters of resonance. The book offers dialogic transnational interchange, a play of eclectic ethnic voices, inquiries, perspectives, and differences. The studies in this interdisciplinary volume show that – through resonant engagement with(in) and between works – literary production can both enhance and disturb cultural narratives of ethnicity.
