Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction

Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction PDF Author: Megan Hoffman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137536667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
This book provides an original and compelling analysis of the ways in which British women’s golden age crime narratives negotiate the conflicting social and cultural forces that influenced depictions of gender in popular culture in the 1920s until the late 1940s. The book explores a wide variety of texts produced both by writers who have been the focus of a relatively large amount of critical attention, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but also those who have received comparatively little, such as Christianna Brand, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. Through its original readings, this book explores the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in golden age crime fiction, and shows that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe’ solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.

Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction

Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction PDF Author: Megan Hoffman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137536667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
This book provides an original and compelling analysis of the ways in which British women’s golden age crime narratives negotiate the conflicting social and cultural forces that influenced depictions of gender in popular culture in the 1920s until the late 1940s. The book explores a wide variety of texts produced both by writers who have been the focus of a relatively large amount of critical attention, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but also those who have received comparatively little, such as Christianna Brand, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. Through its original readings, this book explores the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in golden age crime fiction, and shows that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe’ solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.

Women Writing Women

Women Writing Women PDF Author: Megan Hoffman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crime in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Get Book

Book Description


Murdering Miss Marple

Murdering Miss Marple PDF Author: Julie H. Kim
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786490039
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
During the interwar “golden age” of British detective fiction, women writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie reigned, but their work remains tame compared to today’s crime novels. Elements of sexuality and gender, including soft porn and sexual psychopathy, pervade contemporary detective fiction. The 10 essays in this collection explore issues of gender and sexuality in crime writing by women from 1985 to 2011, surveying works about girl sleuths, parodies, hard-boiled detective fiction, police procedurals, and recent serial killer series. They examine the relationship between genre and gender and explore how later works enter into a field of “post-feminism.” Most importantly, this volume demonstrates how popular women writers of the last three decades have reconceptualized what it means to be a female detective.

Intersectionality and Decolonisation in Contemporary British Crime Fiction

Intersectionality and Decolonisation in Contemporary British Crime Fiction PDF Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152759159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
Intersectionality and decolonisation are prominent themes in contemporary British crime fiction. Through an in-depth critical and contextual analysis of selected contemporary British crime fiction novels from the 1990s to 2018, this distinctive book examines representations of race, class, sexuality, and gender by John Harvey, Stella Duffy, M.Y. Alam, and Dorothy Koomson. It argues that contemporary British crime fiction is a field of contestation where urgent cultural and social questions are debated and the politics of representation explored. A significant resource which will be valuable to researchers and scholars of the crime genre, as well as British literature, this book offers timely critical engagement with intersectionality and decolonisation and their representation in contemporary British crime fiction.

Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction

Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction PDF Author: Alistair Rolls
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100060439X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

Book Description
This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This book's approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard’s self-styled ‘detective criticism’; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie’s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie’s most famous works. This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction, literary studies and comparative literature.

Contemporary European Crime Fiction

Contemporary European Crime Fiction PDF Author: Monica Dall'Asta
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031219791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book

Book Description
This book represents the first extended consideration of contemporary crime fiction as a European phenomenon. Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries. It asks how the genre’s excavation of Europe’s history of violence and protest in the twentieth century is informed by contemporary political questions. It also considers how the genre’s progressive reimagining of new identities forged at the crossroads of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is offset by its bleaker assessment of the corrosive effects of entrenched social inequalities, political corruption, and state violence. The result is a rich, vibrant collection that shows how crime fiction can help us better understand the complex relationship between Europe’s past, present, and future. Seven chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

100 British Crime Writers

100 British Crime Writers PDF Author: Esme Miskimmin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 113731902X
Category : British literature
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
100 British Crime Writers explores a history of British crime writing between 1855 and 2015 through 100 writers, detailing their lives and significant writing and exploring their contributions to the genre. Divided into four sections: 'The Victorians, Edwardians, and World War One, 1855-1918; 'The Golden Age and World War Two, 1919-1945; 'Post-War and Cold War, 1946-1989; and 'To the Millennium and Beyond, 1990-2015, each section offers an introduction to the significant features of these eras in crime fiction and discusses trends in publication, readership, and critical response. With entries spanning the earliest authors of crime fiction to a selection of innovative contemporary novelists, this book considers the development and progression of the genre in the light of historical and social events.

Sleuthing Miss Marple

Sleuthing Miss Marple PDF Author: Desirée Prideaux
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800854455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Clemence Dane

Clemence Dane PDF Author: Louise McDonald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000206076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book

Book Description
This feminist investigation of the works of Clemence Dane joins the growing body of research into the relationship of female-authored texts to the ideology and cultural hegemony of the Edwardian and inter-war period. An amalgam of single-author study and thematic period analysis, through sustained cultural engagement, this book explores Dane’s journalism, drama and fiction to interrogate a range of issues: inter-war women’s writing, the Middlebrow, feminism, (homo) sexuality, liberal politics, domesticity, and concepts of the spinster. It examines form and a range of fictional genres: drama, bildungsroman, detective fiction, historical saga and gothic fiction. It relates back to the genre writing of comparable authors. These include Rosamond Lehmann, Vita Sackville-West, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Dorothy Strachey, Dodie Smith, Rachel Ferguson, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Daphne Du Maurier, G.B.Stern, and detective writers: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, Marjorie Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Offering a picture of an era, focalised through Dane and contextualised through her journalism and the work of her female peers, it argues that Dane is often markedly more radically feminist than these contemporaries. She engages with broad issues of social justice irrespective of gender and her humanity is demonstrated through her sympathetic representations of marginalised characters of both sexes. However, she most specifically evidences a gender politics consistent with the fragmented and multifarious essentialist feminism that emerged following the Great War, which esteemed ‘womanly’ qualities of care and mothering but simultaneously valued female autonomy, single status and professionalism. Adopting the critical paradigms of domestic modernism and women‘s liminality, the book will particularly focus on the trajectories of Dane’s extraordinary modern heroines, who possess qualities of altruism, candour, integrity, imagination, intuition, resilience and rebelliousness. Over the course of her work, these fictional women increasingly challenge oppressive normative forms of domesticity, traversing physical thresholds to create alternative domesticities in self-defining living and working spaces.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie PDF Author: Mary Anna Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350212482
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book

Book Description
Nominated for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical / Biography 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.