Anglophone Golden Age Detective Fiction and the World Wars
Anglophone Golden Age Detective Fiction and the World Wars
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Description
An exploration of how the contexts and cultures of war influenced the Golden Age of detective fiction, this edited collection uncovers the range of realistic, uneasy, subtextual and fantastical responses to war by the period's most respected and under-studied crime writers. Hitherto considered to be contained within the interwar period and largely apolitical and insulated from a changing and dangerous world, this volume busts open such notions of Golden Age crime writing to showcase how experiences of war were crucial to its composition.
Examining the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, E.C.R. Lorac, Anthony Berkeley, Cyril Hare and many more, Golden Age Detective Fiction and the World Wars brings together scholars exploring such themes as the overlap of detective fiction and espionage, the representation of eugenics and anti-Semitism in England in the shadow of Nazi ideology, and the impact of the Blitz on the crime scene. The Golden Age is usually located within an English tradition, but chapters here also show how the key tropes of the 'clue-puzzle', the middle-class milieu, the country house, and the adventurous amateur detective appear in American detective fiction of the period, the Nancy Drew series, Ruritanian adventure stories, and children's fiction; the influences and re-contextualisations of these tropes form an under-studied fictional response to war. Alert to these tropes in later fiction, chapters also consider the legacy of warfare and the influence of the Golden Age in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, via the work of famous Golden Age commentator W. H. Auden.
Offering an expansion on traditional understandings of Golden Age detective fiction, this volume invites a re-evaluation of assumptions about crime writing and connected genres, war, and how literature is classified and understood.
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Table of Contents
2. All Clear? Representations of First World War Participants by U.S. Female Mystery Writers in the Interwar Period, Elizabeth Foxwell (Managing Editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection)
3. Not Just Postwar Comfort Food: Consumption and Gender in Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey Novels, Marta Usiekniewicz (University of Warsaw, Poland)
4. “I am an Austrian refugee and a Jew, who has become a naturalized Briton”: The Representation of Jewish Characters in Golden Age War Novels, Sue Vice (University of Sheffield, UK)
5. “My Code Doesn't Approve of Punishment”: Extrajudicial Investigations in the Interwar Works of Anthony Berkeley Cox, Robin Ramsey (University of Salford, UK)
6. The War Reaches Ruritania: Reading the Golden Age's Imaginary Conflicts, Hamish Crawford (Independent Scholar, UK)
7. “Puts Me in Mind of War Days”: Nancy Drew and the Secrets of the Second World War, Lucy Andrew (University of Chester, UK)
8. “The Spy Fever One Always Gets in Wars”: Re-Inscribing the English Country House in Second World War Children's Fiction, Rebecca Mills (Bournemouth University, UK)
9. No More Fooling Around: John Dickson Carr and the Second World War in Nine – and Death Makes Ten (1940), Benjamin Parris (University of St Andrews, UK)
10. On Two Fronts: Espionage and the War Effort in Ngaio Marsh's Wartime New Zealand Crime Novels, Heather Robinson (City University of New York, USA)
11. “Undoubtedly, bombing does something to you.”: Influences of a Dislocated Landscape in E. C. R. Lorac's Murder by Matchlight (1945), Sarah Martin (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
12. Blackout Culture and Henry Green's Wartime Mysteries, Melissa Dinsman (City University of New York, USA)
13. The Wimseys at War: Dorothy L. Sayers' Chronicles of the Early Second World War, Elizabeth Prevost (Grinnell College, USA)
14. Eugenics and the 1940s: Raising the Curtain on Ableism in Poirot's Last Case, Tina Hodgkinson (The London Archives, UK)
15. “Until the Guilt is Everywhere”: W. H. Auden, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Detection in the Age of Area Bombing, Rachel Bryan (University of Oxford, UK)
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 22 Jul 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350633995 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Bloomsbury Studies in Global Crime Narratives |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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