Topic 19: Agatha Christie
March 6th, 2023
Critiques of High Modernism
One of the main critiques of the high modernism of the 19th and early 20th centuries was that it
did not appeal to the general public (emerging mass market for reading).
● Christie, according to legend, remains the most successful/best-selling author of all time.
Agatha Christie
Both into an upper-middle class family – a lot of her novels have a lot of racism in them.
● Extremely prolific, writing one book after another.
Why is this writer so popular? She does not have the pretensions to great literariness (Christie
doesn’t pretend to have the same literary ambitions as Woolf).
● Writing and reading not as high art, but as mental games and entertainment.
● She does not only inhabit the genre of entertaining fiction, but is also really good at
working within the formula.
Patterns
Pattern: the story often moves from the countryside to a luxurious urban area.
● Limited setting – nobody goes in and out (a group of people that don’t seem to have
anything in common, but all turn out in ways that seem to have their own motives).
Ideological locale – Christie presents a certain view on how society ought to operate.
● Huge impact – the image of the society and the culture as fundamentally rooted in little
villages, where people know their place in the social hierarchy, etc.
Background
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – immensely popular and began to influence other books.
Agatha Christie disappeared! There were a lot of things happening in her time at the same time:
● Her mother died suddenly;
● Her husband wanted a divorce from her to marry his mistress.
The writer's life merged with her mysterious worlds – she became the mystery.
● Government involvement in trying to figure out where she is!
Christie shows up a couple of weeks later in a private hospital under an assumed name (she
claims she has no memory of what happened).
Genre
There is an amusing self-consciousness in the genre. Christie slips in a little bit of satire about
the genre at the novel's beginning.
● There’s a level at which Christie is very aware that she is operating with formulas –
readers come to this form of fiction with certain pre-existing expectations about how the
story will operate.
Background
March 6th, 2023
Critiques of High Modernism
One of the main critiques of the high modernism of the 19th and early 20th centuries was that it
did not appeal to the general public (emerging mass market for reading).
● Christie, according to legend, remains the most successful/best-selling author of all time.
Agatha Christie
Both into an upper-middle class family – a lot of her novels have a lot of racism in them.
● Extremely prolific, writing one book after another.
Why is this writer so popular? She does not have the pretensions to great literariness (Christie
doesn’t pretend to have the same literary ambitions as Woolf).
● Writing and reading not as high art, but as mental games and entertainment.
● She does not only inhabit the genre of entertaining fiction, but is also really good at
working within the formula.
Patterns
Pattern: the story often moves from the countryside to a luxurious urban area.
● Limited setting – nobody goes in and out (a group of people that don’t seem to have
anything in common, but all turn out in ways that seem to have their own motives).
Ideological locale – Christie presents a certain view on how society ought to operate.
● Huge impact – the image of the society and the culture as fundamentally rooted in little
villages, where people know their place in the social hierarchy, etc.
Background
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – immensely popular and began to influence other books.
Agatha Christie disappeared! There were a lot of things happening in her time at the same time:
● Her mother died suddenly;
● Her husband wanted a divorce from her to marry his mistress.
The writer's life merged with her mysterious worlds – she became the mystery.
● Government involvement in trying to figure out where she is!
Christie shows up a couple of weeks later in a private hospital under an assumed name (she
claims she has no memory of what happened).
Genre
There is an amusing self-consciousness in the genre. Christie slips in a little bit of satire about
the genre at the novel's beginning.
● There’s a level at which Christie is very aware that she is operating with formulas –
readers come to this form of fiction with certain pre-existing expectations about how the
story will operate.
Background
