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.
Poor old dragon. Nobody wants him in their story. Not Goldilocks, not Hansel and Gretel – no one. But Dragon will not give up! He shall continue on his course of finding someone who wants him in their story. ANYONE. His boundless enthusiasm surely won't get him into any trouble. Surely ... A glorious story about dragons, heroes and one very big sneeze. From author Lou Carter, a phenomenal new talent, and Deborah Allwright, illustrator of the bestselling The Night Pirates. This eBook comes with a glorious audio accompaniment, read by CBeebies star Justin Fletcher.
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?
Larabeth McLeod has beauty, money, several patents, a Ph.D., a successful environmental firm, and some very old secrets. When a man with the uncomfortable name of Babykiller begins stalking her, terrorizing her with stories of her darkest days in Vietnam, she feels compelled to fight back...until he exposes her most tender secret of all by threatening the daughter she has never met.She turns to private detective J.D. Hatten for help, breaking five years of separation and silence between quarreling friends. And then Babykiller shows his true capabilities. If she goes to the police for protection, people will die. Lots and lots of people will die. And one of them will be her daughter.Larabeth and J.D. are just a normal man and woman, up against a babykiller. But then, maybe Babykiller picked the wrong people to play his twisted game...WOUNDED EARTH is the first thriller by award-winning mystery writer Mary Anna Evans, author of ARTIFACTS, RELICS, EFFIGIES, FINDINGS, FLOODGATES, and in 2011, PLUNDER.What People are Saying About Mary Anna Evans' Fiction--For Florida Book Awards Bronze Medalist EFFIGIES:"We mystery lovers who've enjoyed Artifacts and then decided that Relics was even better may not believe this, but Ms. Evans has done it again, and Effigies is the best one yet. Again, she makes a lesson in our past a fascinating read."--Tony Hillerman, recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award, among many other honors.For Benjamin Franklin Award-winner ARTIFACTS:"It's always fun to discover a new Florida voice, especially one who can bring to life the rich texture-the sand, the sea, the moss-draped live oaks, the seedy fishing shacks, the salted boat culture-of the state's coast...the menace and the history are resolved in a hurricane of a finale."--Tampa TribuneFor IMBA Bestseller RELICS:"A fascinating look at contemporary archaeology but also a twisted story of greed and its effects." Dallas Morning News
As we move through the 21st century, the importance of science fiction to the study of English Literature is becoming increasingly apparent. The Science Fiction Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field. In particular, it provides detailed entries on major writers in the SF field who might be encountered on university-level English Literature courses, ranging from H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick, to Doris Lessing and Geoff Ryman. Other features include an historical timeline, sections on key writers, critics and critical terms, and case studies of both literary and critical works. In the later sections of the book, the changing nature of the science fiction canon and its growing role in relation to the wider categories of English Literature are discussed in depth introducing the reader to the latest critical thinking on the field.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory was a PROSE Award finalist. The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art of contemporary feminist thought. With chapters written by world-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, the book explores the latest thinking on key topics in current feminist discourse, including: · Feminist subjectivity – from identity, difference, and intersectionality to affect, sex and the body · Feminist texts – writing, reading, genre and critique · Feminism and the world – from power, trauma and value to technology, migration and community Including insights from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, political science and sociology, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory is an essential overview of current feminist thinking and future directions for scholarship, debate and activism.
Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett's work. Covering the full range of Beckett's writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished 'Mongrel Mime', the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett's poetics. "James Little's Beckett in Confinement offers a brilliant analysis of the politics behind Beckett's production of closed space, both as a writer and as a director. It carefully examines the move from writing about closed space to creating an art of confinement. To argue that Beckett's use of confined space is central to the political dynamics of his works, James Little also superbly employs genetic criticism to open up the confined space of the published text and bring highly relevant draft materials back into the critical conversation." Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford, UK "The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett's correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett's varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work's ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor." Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK "Little breaks new ground in this expansive investigation to explore how confinement is a central component of Beckett's political aesthetics ... The reader is guided by a crisp and easy style of writing as Little demonstrates a command of sources which are broad in scope, but negotiated to form a compelling and impactful study." Journal of Beckett Studies
How did social, cultural and political events concerning Britain during the 1940s reshape modern British fiction? During the Second World War and in its aftermath, British literature experienced and recorded drastic and decisive changes to old certainties. Moving from potential invasion and defeat to victory, the creation of the welfare state and a new Cold war threat, the pace of historical change seemed too rapid and monumental for writers to match. Consequently the 1940s were often side-lined in literary accounts as a dividing line between periods and styles. Drawing on more recent scholarship and research, this volume surveys and analyses this period's fascinating diversity, from novels of the Blitz and the Navy to the rise of important new voices with its contributors exploring the work of influential women, Commonwealth, exiled, genre, avant-garde and queer writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the intriguing decade, this book offers substantial chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell as well as covering such writers as Jocelyn Brooke, Monica Dickens, James Hadley Chase, Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Renault, Denton Welch and many others.
This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment. Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.
