What Would Agatha Christie Do? Exploring Escapism, Popular Culture, and Family in YA Murder Mysteries

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

Critics of the Harlem Renaissance often pair Nella Larsen with Jessie Fauset, but Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher make a better literary pair than do Fauset and Larsen. Like Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman, both Larsen and Fisher believed that sexual desire is a primary force in human nature but one shaped by the ubiquitous presence of modernity. One manifestation of modernity, of course, is popular culture - cabarets, film, and pulp fiction. And as modernists, Larsen and Fisher saw that popular culture was a source of modernism, especially American modernism. For instance, as murder mysteries, Larsen's Passing (1929) and Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies (1932) are indebted to a modernist conception that a lowbrow literary genre like a detective novel might reveal, in Raymond Chandler's famous phrase, a “hidden truth.” In Quicksand (1928), Larsen makes use of another aspect of popular culture (both cinematic and literary), the sensational story of the “tragic mulatta,” but her allusion to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) reinterprets that story as an examination of love in a post World War I universe. Finally, in Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies , the clue to the murderer's identity lies not in rational analysis (which presupposes Newtonian order) but in a comic blues song about sexual desire heard daily on Harlem's streets. Echoing Plato's Symposium , all three novels treat sexual desire as the engine in the human machine that can either destroy the self or create the possibility for transcendence, either personal or communal.

Persona is a public presentation of identity. One of the key values of a persona is its consistency in its presentation of the self. This article is designed to be the first exploratory steps and overview in charting the idea of seriality in relation to persona and its utility as a concept to describe the constancy and transformation of identity that is now elemental to understanding contemporary persona or the public presentation of the self and its online manifestations. Seriality in terms of persona is first investigated from its entertainment culture origins – with its use in the constitution of characters in fiction in novels, films, games and most prevalently in television. Several examples of serial persona will be analysed with an emphasis on how television has constructed often the most powerful personas: Kevin Spacey’s persona as Frank Underwood in House of Cards is discussed in greater detail in terms of the economic, cultural and affective value of serial persona and its associated formations of risk. It then explores the blending of the fictional and the real in seriality through how popular music performers – in particular Eminem - construct an authentic register of persona to allow for the exploration of the self through emotion and connection. The article concludes with thinking how seriality is connected to the constitutions of online identity and links the concept with aspects of virality and meme culture and their constructions of value, patterns and constancy as it relate to the presentation of the public self.

A review and critique of Denise Hamilton’s work of fiction, Damage Control (Scribner, 2011, 384 pages). This analysis shares insight on some of the novel’s overriding themes of journalism, gender and ethics and their relationship with crisis communications. Through an examination of the main character, it reveals the differences and similarities between Hamilton’s version of celebrity crisis management and representations of the field in popular culture. The novel portrays a version of perception management that is difficult, dirty and dangerous, but deeply satisfying – a concept that differs from what film and television depictions prove. Hamilton’s riveting and page-turning work piques readers’ curiosity into a murder mystery that involves politics, secrecy, relationships, rape and the strategies the female protagonist uses in her responsibility to reduce the damage. ©Journal of Professional Communication, all rights reserved.

When readers become victims of the murder mysteries they are immersed in, when superheroes embark on a quest to challenge their authors or when the fictional rock band Gorillaz flirt with Madonna during their performance, then metalepsis in popular culture occurs. Metalepsis describes the transgression of the boundary between the fictional world and (a representation of) the real world. This volume establishes a transmedial definition of metalepsis and explores the phenomenon in twelve case studies across media and genres of popular culture: from film, TV series, animated cartoons, graphic novels and popular fiction to pop music, music videos, holographic projections and fan cultures. Narrative studies have considered metalepsis so far largely as a phenomenon of postmodern or avant-garde literature. Metalepsis in Popular Culture investigates metalepsis’ ties to the popular and traces its transmedial importance through a wealth of examples from the turn of the 20th century to this day. The articles also address larger issues such as readerly immersion, the appeal of complexity in popular culture, or the negotiation of fiction and reality in media, and invite readers to rethink these issues through the prism of metalepsis.

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture by Kathleen Forni Helen Young Forni, Kathleen, Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2013; paperback; pp. 176; R.R.P. US$40.00; ISBN 9780786473441. Kathleen Forni’s book examines the Anglophone popular culture reception of Geoffrey Chaucer in the past two decades or so, consciously building on earlier work by Candace Barrington and Steve Ellis. Chaucer has been a mainstay of Middle English studies since the very early days of the academy – [End Page 207] and of English poetry for much longer – and his reputation, and the reception of his works in later centuries has been the topic of considerable interest in recent decades. At less than 170 pages, it is a slim volume, but nonetheless makes a solid contribution to the field. In her Introduction, Forni contests the categories of professional (academic) and popular, ‘positing a continuation rather than a chasm’ between them (p. 11). She takes a cultural studies approach to assert the significance of Chaucer’s popular reception in an argument that largely parallels those made to justify the study of popular medievalisms much more broadly. That it does not reference the ongoing discussions around medievalism is one of the more striking gaps in this Introduction, one which leads it substantially to re-cover already trodden ground. Making connections to that scholarship would also have contextualised the argument and discussion of Chaucer within the much broader context of contemporary popular receptions of the Middle Ages. The first chapter is the most substantial in terms of both length and analytical depth. It offers an overview of much of the material the book covers, structured by four different modes of intertextuality: adaptation, appropriation, invocation, and citation. This framework provides a vocabulary for talking about how meaning is made by different kinds of reference to Chaucer and his work. The approach allows Forni to demonstrate a veritable ‘proliferation of meaning’ (p. 59). Genre and medium variously shape what Chaucerian intertexuality signifies; neither the icon nor his works have a fixed meaning across the diversity of popular culture. The comparative framework, however, also allows Forni to identify pilgrimage and satire as two common motifs. She also finds more coherence between the framing story of pilgrimage and embedded tales in modern works than in The Canterbury Tales, with the framing story acting as ‘an inclusive discursive platform, allowing a diversity of voices’ (p. 59). The remaining four chapters consist of case studies of texts and genres, engaging in greater depth with some of the works initially discussed in the first. Chapter 2, ‘Chaucer the Detective’, focuses on historical murder mysteries which either take place during the pilgrimage to Canterbury, presenting it as an historical event and the pilgrims as suspects – and at times victims – and a second set which delve into the gaps in Chaucer’s known biography to see him play detective. Chaucer, in such works, becomes an agent of social order, and although he at times acts on behalf of the powerless he is also often unable to act against the corrupt. The third chapter, ‘Chaucer on the TV Screen’, explores two of the most well-known recent adaptations of The Canterbury Tales: the BBC’s modernised Canterbury Tales (2003), and Jonathon Myerson’s animated Canterbury Tales (1998–2000). Forni argues that both have a certain fidelity or respect for their source material, while also exploring the many changes wrought by the new media and the new cultural context. [End Page 208] Chapter 4, ‘The Canterbury Pilgrimage and African Diaspora’, presents material that, though likely to be unfamiliar to Australian and New Zealand readers, attests more than any other to the diversity of Chaucer’s popular afterlives. The works it considers, moreover, are closer to the literary or high-culture end of the spectrum than either the mystery novels of the first chapter, or the television series of the second. ‘Cultural, social – and especially female – exclusion and oppression’ are recurrent themes (p. 121). ‘Chaucer the Brand’ is the short final chapter (the book has no Conclusion). It considers Chaucer and his name as cultural commodities. Forni shows that Chaucer-as-brand has consistent meanings...

New Nordic Mythologies

British film studios enjoyed unusually high prominence in the 1930s, both as places where popular culture was produced and as elements of popular culture in their own right. It is unsurprising, then, that authors of crime fiction chose to set murder mysteries in film studios, exploiting these facilities’ position in the popular imaginary to appeal to fans of both films and detective stories. This article explores a number of studio-set detective novels published in the 1930s, and shows that because the spaces of film production enjoyed ambiguous connotations – at once glamourous and dangerous, fascinating yet unknowable – they afforded authors of crime fiction specific advantages, not least in that they were sites where time and space were approached in an essentially ludic manner, and where identity was mutable and unstable.

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. By Mary Ting Yi Lui (Princeton UP 2005) Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity. By Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (University of California Press 2005) In the sixty-plus years between the Chinese Exclusion Act and its repeal in 1943, the popular demand for goods from East Asia, and in particular China, was at an all-time high. American constructs and images of the Chinese were featured in museums, minstrel shows, the fashion industry, and dime store novels, and in the emerging narratives of Hollywood. Yet, while imported items were welcome, Chinese immigrants were not, despite the fact that Chinese labor was instrumental in the development of the mining and railroad industries. While U.S. immigration laws and the propaganda of the "Yellow Peril" have been widely documented in discussions of history, literature, politics, and sociology, few studies have discussed how popular culture framed the interactions between Chinese Americans and non-Chinese during this time.1 Continuing the threads of such studies, Mary Ting Yi Lui's The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity [End Page 313] delve into a new area of inquiry that focuses on alternative images of Chinese Americans which refute popular print journalism and Hollywood film representations. Both books explore Chinese American movements and crossings of racial, gender, and class boundaries, and question the more familiar image of American citizenship and identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Importantly, these works highlight the transient and subjective nature of racial categories even at a time when many believed racial categories to be more rigid than those of our current climate. Both books talk about the purposeful strategies that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans employed to survive, and even thrive, in the era of Chinese Exclusion and naturalization laws that denied the rights of citizenship to Chinese Americans and eventually to all Asians until after Second World War. Mary Ting Yi Lui's book, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, is the perfect blend of a thrilling mystery bestseller and a detailed cultural history—a book that mirrors the popular pulp fiction and newspaper serials that gained popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As her frame for the book, Liu focuses on how one touchstone sensationalist murder mystery intersected, challenged, and highlighted race, gender, and class relations between Chinese and non-Chinese residents of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century New York. In June of 1909, New York police found the strangled body of Elsie Sigel stuffed in a large trunk in the apartment of her lover and former student, Leon Ling. Despite a massive international manhunt, Leon Ling was never captured and the case remains unsolved. Lui draws us in with the lurid details of the case and the popular press coverage of the murder. She then proceeds to answer the questions arising from this murder, such as how did a Chinese man and a white woman meet, study together, and become lovers at a time when cross racial interactions were often against the law? Mary Lui's creative, lively, and informative book addresses each aspect of this question with a chapter-by-chapter analysis. The first two chapters of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery document the history of Chinese Americans in New York, and focuses on the social and cultural position of Chinese men at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of Liu's major interests is examining the physical mobility of Chinese Americans in New York, and thereby countering the popular static and one-dimensional stereotypes of Chinese as exotic others. Increased...

The Royal Treatment

Dystopian near‐future fantasies of violent white revolution and genocide—most infamously, William L. Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978)—are the most well‐known and studied fictions by white extremists. They are, however, not the only genre through which the extreme far‐right engage with popular culture. In this article, we explore how popular historical fictions can accomodate white extremist presence and propagandising. We analyse generic conventions in the medieval murder mystery The Black Flame (2001) by self‐identified neo‐Nazi Harold A. Covington (1953–2018), showing that the book shares trends and tropes with contemporary medievalisms, including in historical crime fiction and other popular genres and media. By focussing on these conventions, we seek common places in the popular that can, paradoxically, create space for the fringe extreme.

Cooking in the Books: Cookbooks and Cookery in Popular Fiction

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

“Walk the streets of Cairo or the village lanes in Egypt in any early evening and you will see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue music of the current serial (musalsal) Read the newspapers and you will find articles and cartoons that can be only understood if you are following these televised dramas. The serials…seem to set the very rhythms of national life.”1 This statement by Lila Abu-Lughod affirms what anyone who has spent a significant time in Egypt knows, that the serial drama (musalsal), whether it is on radio or television, has been and continues to be an important aspect of Egyptian popular culture. Abu-Lughod not only recognizes that the serial is a very popular source of entertainment but that it is a uniting factor for the Egyptian national community. It is hardly surprising, then, that a medium that is so pervasive and so intertwined in the national consciousness has been coopted by groups in Egypt to disseminate their ideas or ideologies. This study will focus on a specific incidence of this within the Coptic community: the co-option of the musalsal as a medium to portray the narratives of the lives of their saints, in effect hagiographies. This is, no doubt, an interesting development from a cultural standpoint because it represents the use of a form of entertainment typically reserved for love triangles, murder mysteries and various other mundane topics. The main goal of this study is to answer why the producers of these dramas have chosen the musalsal as a way to present the hagiographies. To help answer this question I have framed my discussion with two brief histories: first, that of television in Egypt, focusing on the importance of the musalsal in its development and second, that of the Coptic Church in Egypt. I then move from the general history to an examination of the importance of the hagiography of saints to the reform movement in the Coptic Church and to the creation of a Coptic “imagined community” or, as Paul Sedra puts it, “Coptism”.