Veranstaltung:
Kollegienhaus, lecture theatre 118
Veranstalter:
Prof. Dr Ina Habermann
Dull Dogs and Englishmen: Replotting gender and genre in Agatha Christie’s Second World War Fiction
Agatha Christie lived, and wrote, through two world wars, a depression, the enfranchisement of women, the rise of fascism, the birth of the welfare state, the emergence of the Cold War, the end of Empire and the swinging sixties. Her fiction inevitably bears the imprint of these social and political transformations. In this talk I will explore one of the most complex periods within Christie’s long career – the 1940s – as a case study of the ways in which the tensions, anxieties and desires of a changing Britain found expression in her novels. After examining larger trends in Christie’s writing – changes in the way she approaches both character and plot – I will focus on two particularly significant novels of the period, Towards Zero (1944) and The Hollow (1945). Through these examples I trace changing cultural ideas about gender and nation, and consider the role of popular fictions in the postwar reconstruction of masculinity.
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