Abstract
Agatha Christie’s popularity seems obvious to everybody except literary critics. In this chapter I shall explore this persistent popularity, and try to articulate it by drawing on German literary terms; in particular the notion of Heimatdichtung.
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Notes
See John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976) pp. 111–31; Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, ed. H. R. F. Keating (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) passim; Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) pp. 107–34; Julian Symons, Bloody Murder (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1974) pp. 102–4, 110–12, 134–5.
A comprehensive listing of Christie’s many works is available in Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion (London: W. H. Allen, 1984) passim.
Catherine Belsey uses this helpful description in ‘Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text’, in Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) p. 53.
Ernst Bloch, ‘Philosophische Ansicht des Detektivromans’, in Gesammelte Werke, Bd 9 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965) pp. 242–63. I am indebted to Bloch’s distinction between the detektivisch and the detektorisch aspects of the crime narrative.
Rosalind Brunt has commented in a similar way on the image created of and by Barbara Cartland in ‘A Career in Love: the Romantic World of Barbara Cartland’, in Christopher Pawling (ed.), Popular Fiction and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1984) pp. 127–56.
See Heinrich Meyer’s introduction, ‘Bestseller Research Problems’, in Donald Ray Richards, The German Bestseller in the 20th Century: A Complete Bibliography and Analysis, 1915–1940 (Berne: Herbert Lang, 1968).
Peter Zimmermann, Der Bauernroman (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1975) p. 99.
A much fuller description of Heimatdichtung, Blut und Boden and Trivialliteratur can be found in the following: Helga Geyer-Ryan, ‘Popular Literature in the Third Reich’, trans. Kiernan Ryan, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham Stencilled Occasional Paper, no. 60, pp. 1–15; Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 357; Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, trans. Ernest A. Menze (London: Croom Helm, 1978) pp. 154–62; Uwe K. Ketelsen, Völkisch-Nationale und Nationalsozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 1890–1945 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976) passim; Walter Nutz, ‘Trivialliteratur Seit 1965’, in Paul Michael Lüzeler and Egon Schwarz (eds), Deutsche Literatur in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965 (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980) pp. 150–63; J. M. Ritchie, German Literature under National Socialism (London: Croom Helm, 1983) pp. 8–20, 94–110; Zimmerman, Der Bauernroman, passim.
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: Fontana/Collins, 1978) pp. 421–2.
Ibid., p. 423.
Mary Louise Pratt lists these activities as assumed female verbal procedures in ‘Linguistic Utopias’, in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durrant and C. MacCabe (eds), The Linguistics of Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) p. 54.
See the Introduction by Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson in their Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London and New York: Methuen 1986), pp. 1–15, for a discussion of how television and film create a fusion of ‘great’ and ‘minor’ literature within the realm of the popular.
Simon Frith in ‘The Pleasures of the Hearth’ in Formations of Pleasure, ed. Formations Editorial Collective: Tony Bennett et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) pp. 101–23, discusses how the wireless was seen as a ‘radio hearth’ for the family, in the BBC’s Reithian aims of creating a public service and entertainment for a common culture.
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© 1990 Anna-Marie Taylor
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Taylor, AM. (1990). Home is Where the Hearth Is: The Englishness of Agatha Christie’s Marple Novels. In: Bell, I.A., Daldry, G. (eds) Watching the Detectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10591-5_9
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