c/o Cedar Lodge Lower Argyll Road Exeter, United Kingdom EX4 4RG
Degree: Ph.D.
Format: HTML CD-ROM
Description:
STATEMENT OF PROGRAM OF WORK
There are two separate but fully complementary components of my Ph.D. proposal. I intend to study the topic in question -- British female detective novelists between the World Wars -- in the traditional manner using the techniques of literary analysis and socio-hist orical study. However, I will not be presenting the material in the traditional manner. My dissertation will be in hypertext and will have the finished form of a CD-ROM. This method of presentation allows me to explore the latest computer applications while at the same time permitting the thesis to expand in a tangential, as well as linear, fashion. Through the incorporation of literary theory, socio-cultural studies, critical annotation , the novels themselves in question, biographies, pictures, films, etc. as visual footnotes I will be enhancing the core of the hypertext, my thesis. The reader will then be able to take control of the text and move where s/he wants within the "text," rather than w here the printed word traditionally takes her/him. Yet the core of this hypertext CD-ROM will be the critical study of British female detective novelists between the World Wars. The British detective novel emerged from the Edwardian era in the form of a constructed puzzle as best evidenced by the analytical deductions of Sherlock Holmes. Everything in t he novels became subordinate to the intellectual interest as the detective story evolved into a game played between author and reader with the clues scattered fairly throughout the narrative. However, the traditional Edwardian detective genre changed form through th e 1920s and 1930s, arguably because of the social unrest created by World War One. Dorothy Sayers said that the beauty of the detective novel was in its "Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle and end." The detective novelists of the immediate postwar pe riod were creating works which were impeccably classical in form. The appeal was to the better educated classes who had the most to lose by the threat of social disorder. The worlds maintained the detective novelists of the 1920s were aristocratic and beautifully u nreal and in which the subversion was always contained by the end of the work. There was a reassurance in these works that trouble was transitory and that the prewar world could be easily maintained. The detective novels firmly asserted a static nature of society.
I wish to examine the works of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie with in the context of this fixed yet uneasily hierarchical society. To generalize, their works in the 1920s sustained a falsely aristocratic and uncompromisingly world which consoli dated the feelings of the upper classes and appealed to the snobbish elements of the lower classes. However, society was changing and people began to find it increasingly diffic ult to accept the platitudes offered by the detective genre. The growing fear of war crept into the works and violence began to shatter the idyllic word that they had maintained . The form changed accordingly and, in the 1930s, Allingham, Sayers and Christie were moving towards a more personal narrative wherein conflict and dissension were not always co ntained. The detective novel in Britain shifted towards and articulation of an actual form - a novel of manners rather than a puzzle. I propose to examine this idea in-depth with specific examples from all the inter-war works of Allingham, Sayers and Christie. How do they create their aristocratic and conserva tive worlds? Do all their novels follow this precise pattern? Are they part of a larger literary paradigm or are the changes owing to the maturation of the detective genre alon e? Do they become actual novels of manners? The thesis would involve an examination of the post-WWI British literary scene, a thorough analysis of the works of Allingham, Sayers and Christie and, finally, the subsequent application of the above questions all in a hypertextualized CD-Rom format.
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