CFP Agatha Christie (Special Issue of Clues) (7/1/15)

CFP: Reappropriating Agatha Christie (theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection)

Wednesday, July 16, 2014
H-PCAACA
Reappropriating Agatha Christie
(Theme Issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection)

Guest Editors: Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2015

Nearly 40 years after her death, Agatha Christie’s hold over her work goes largely unchallenged. Critical approaches can be overshadowed by an interest in her as an author (her remarkable talent, personality, and life). The extensive fan community and the flourishing Christie industry tend to steer reception of her writing away from academic critics. These constraints conspire to create an obstruction of interpretive possibilities not unlike the “foreclosure of meaning” that Pierre Bayard, in his iconoclastic study of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, has identified as central to Christie’s novels.

Bayard’s controversial intervention opens up new avenues of critical appropriation centered on the literary text itself and its possibilities. Such reappropriation can release the latencies and potentials of her writing, repositioning her in a new historical environment and making her relevant, beyond matters of mere reading pleasure, to a contemporary critical audience.

Articles are invited that offer new forms of critical/creative appropriation of Christie’s works. Some suggested topics include:

•     Adaptation and transmediation

•     New critical readings

•     Christie and the digital humanities (quantitative and computational approaches, media history and theory)

•     Christie and the world (translation, transmission and transformation across borders, Christie as world literature)

•     Christie and the history of the book (materialist approaches)

•     Christie and affects (representation and production of emotions, moods, atmospheres; noninterpretive approaches)

•     Christie in the contemporary higher education institution

Submissions should include a 50-word abstract and 4–5 keywords, and be between 15 to 20 double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 3,300 to 6,000 words) in Times or Times Roman font with minimal formatting. Manuscripts should follow the MLA Style Manual, including parenthetical citations in text and an alphabetized Works Cited list.

Submit to:

Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, Australia

Email: jesper.gulddal@newcastle.edu.au or alistair.rolls@newcastle.edu.au

Reviews of recent nonfiction on Christie also are of interest. Address questions re the issue to:

Elizabeth Foxwell, Managing Editor, Clues
Email: clues@elizabethfoxwell.com