CfP - The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation

The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation

A 2-day international conference at the University of Chester 3-4 April 2020

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly defined as puzzle-based mystery fiction produced between the First and Second World Wars, is enjoying a renaissance both in the literary marketplace and in scholarship. This conference intervenes in emerging academic debates to define and negotiate the boundaries of Golden Age scholarship.

As well as interrogating the staples of ‘Golden Age’ crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen, the puzzle format, comparisons to ‘the psychological turn’), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour. Topics can include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

Defining the parameters of Golden Age crime

The Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell)

Significant male writers of the Golden Age (John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen)

Lesser-known Golden Age practitioners

Collaborative and round robin novels

Continuation novels

The Detection Club

Parody, pastiche, and postmodernism

Psychology and psychoanalysis

Meta-fiction and self- or inter-referentiality

The language of crime fiction

The Golden Age and social value

Nostalgia and heritage

Writing the past

Gender, sexuality, and queerness

Clues and coding

Crime and the Gothic

Magic and the supernatural

Place, space, and psychogeography

Reissues and rediscovery

Archival finds and innovations

The ‘Second Golden Age’

The influence of Golden Age crime writers on subsequent and contemporary writers

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Teaching Golden Age crime fiction

Organisers: Dr J C Bernthal (University of Cambridge), Sarah Martin (University of Chester), Stefano Serafini (Royal Holloway, University of London)

We welcome academic and creative paper proposals. Please email your 200-word proposal and short biographical note to goldenageofcrime@gmail.com no later than 15th December. Comments and queries should be directed to the same address.

Call for Chapters: Agatha Christie Goes to War

Editors: Dr J.C. Bernthal (Middlesex University) and Dr Rebecca Mills (Bournemouth University).

Chapter proposals are invited for an edited collection exploring and evaluating the role of war in Agatha Christie’s life and writing.

Christie’s work is now recognised not only as a distraction from twentieth-century anxieties and conflicts but also as a way of processing them. Christie’s career was created out of her war work in a Torquay dispensary and her awareness of Belgian refugees; her first husband Archibald Christie was an airman during the First World War and her second husband Max Mallowan served in North Africa during the Second, leaving her behind in Blitzed London. Her work cannot be considered as insulated from these conflicts; themes of displacement, violence, military masculinity and women’s duty resonate throughout her fiction. Gill Plain and Alison Light, for example, have examined the traces of the First World War in the bodies and social scenes of Christie’s Golden Age fiction, while recent television adaptations of And Then There Were None (2015) and Witness for the Prosecution (2016) brought subtexts of post-traumatic stress disorder and social upheaval into the foreground as well as heightening military imagery through lighting and flashbacks. 

Engaging with the legacy of the First World War is part of a turn away from a narratological focus on Christie and the clue-puzzle towards a multiplicity of feminist, queer, and sociological readings that contextualise Christie’s work within its contemporary literary, political, and social environments. Existing scholarship tends to focus on World Wars, especially the First, but Christie’s life and career covered diverse fields, stages, and modes of warfare. We aim to present the first detailed study of the theme of war in Christie’s fiction and life-writing, spanning a range of conflicts in England, Europe, the British Empire and beyond, and responses to events from the Boer War to the Cold War. 

We therefore invite 300-500 word abstracts for contributions of 6000-8000 words that take a global and in-depth approach to wars and their traces in Christie’s work. Please include a brief biographical note. Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

·       - Re-evaluating the First World War in Christie’s life-writing and fiction

·       - Christie’s war work

·       - A comparative approach to war in the work of Christie and her contemporaries

·       - The Second World War—the Blitz, rationing, fifth columnists

·       - Codes and coding

·       - Gender and/or sexuality and war

·       - Displacement and exile

·       - Colonial wars and empire

·       - Foreign fields

·       - Nation, ideology and extremism

·       - Revolution

·       - Representations of Communism and Nazism

·       - The Cold War and global conspiracies

·       - The Spanish Civil War

·       - Thrillers and espionage

·       - War in Christie adaptations

·       - Memory and war

·       - Commemoration

·       - Loss and bereavement

·       - Terrorism

Deadline for abstracts: 30^th June 2017. Estimated deadline for finished chapters: 30^th November 2017.

Email: christiegoestowar@gmail.com

Call for Papers : - Agatha Christie: A Reappraisal

A two day conference, 19th - 20th June 2017, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Julius Green, author of Curtain Up: Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

Merja Makinen, author of Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) has become internationally recognised as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship has legitimised Christie as a writer of substance and a major figure in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture. This conference seeks to finally establish Christie Studies as an academic discipline, extending across and beyond the humanities.

Proposals for twenty-minute papers are invited. Possible themes include but are by no means limited to:

Theorising Agatha Christie

Crime and detectives: generic context

New biographical readings

Christie and modernism

Christie and postmodernism

Political readings, political revisionism

Christie and feminism

Gender, sexuality, and queerness

Adaptations, parodies, and pastiches

Continuation projects

Christie and art

Film and television legacies

Proposals for traditional papers are encouraged, as are proposals for innovative or creative presentations. Please send a 200 word proposal to Mia Dormer (University of Exeter) and Dr Jamie Bernthal (Middlesex University) at agathachristieconference @ gmail.com no later than Tuesday 31 January 2017.

The standard two-day registration fee is expected to be £120.

You can find out more at www.agathachristieconference.com.