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INTRODUCTION
Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie were the most successful British women writers of their time. Their success in terms of income, as well as their enduring popularity and the fact that they remain household names today, is indicative of the vast popularity1 and success of these two women. It is difficult to overlook the important contribution of their writing to the body of fiction produced in England in the early twentieth century, as well as to the greater body of popular literature. Both Christie and Blyton are listed in the top ten authors of a UNESCO publication, the Index Translationum, [which] includes a “hit parade” of the world‟s most translated authors for 1985-1995.
Agatha Christie tops Walt Disney, the Bible, Lenin, Jules Verne, Barbara Cartland, Enid Blyton, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, William Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov, Georges Simenon, Alexandre Dumas (the elder), Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle. (UNESCO) Although the writing of Blyton and Christie differs in a number of respects – in particular that Christie wrote for adults and Blyton for children – there are also marked similarities in their work. This is hardly surprising since these women were contemporaries. Agatha Christie was born in 1890, and Enid Blyton was born seven years later in 1897. The conservative Victorian2 and Edwardian3 environment in which they were raised would definitely have shaped their horizons of expectation.
Their upbringing would have been characterised by a conservative and rigid class system, economic growth and industrialisation, as well as emergent social changes and an increased interest in socialism, the plight of the poor, and women‟s issues would also have influenced their frame of reference. Both Christie and Blyton began writing at a young age and while their first literary attempts were rejected, both women persisted. Blyton had a poem accepted for publication by Nash‟s Magazine in 1917 while Christie‟s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. Success spurred them on and they continued to write. Both Blyton and Christie lived through the First and Second World Wars and the influence of this political landscape on the dominant discourses in England to which Blyton and Christie were exposed cannot be overlooked.
These influences included the imperialist attitudes and the colonialism that both promoted and resulted from the dominance of the British Empire. Blyton and Christie were both shaped by the same dominant patriarchal discourses, and exposed to similar emergent and alternative discourses. Both women divorced their first husbands at a time when divorce was not considered acceptable, and both remarried. Both Blyton and Christie were independent women of independent means at a time when men were considered to be the breadwinners of the family. Moreover, they both wrote detective stories in the years between 1913 and 1936 which would later become known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
In addition, they fit well within the context of popular literature and, therefore, to a great extent, popular culture. Enid Blyton “is a cultural reference point” (Rudd 2000: 37) while Agatha Christie “is part of a British cultural consciousness: everybody „knows‟ something called an „Agatha Christie‟” (Plain 2001: 24). However, the commonalities between Blyton and Christie have received very little critical attention. In this study I take into consideration these similarities in an examination of the influence of discourses in their development of characterisation and their use of setting in their writing.
Research question
In this study I seek to investigate how Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie include emergent, oppositional and alternative discourses in their writing while at the same time portraying the dominant discourses of the society in which they lived and wrote. I examine the contradictory portrayal of discourses of the time in the writing of Blyton and Christie, in particular discourses surrounding gender, race, class, nationality, religion and ethnicity. Given that detective fiction is the medium of this portrayal I examine, too, the discourses that informed this genre during the Golden Age.
TABLE OF CONTENTS :
- Declaration
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abstract
- Key Words
- Introduction
- Chapter One Of power: discourses, hegemony and horizons of expectation
- Chapter Two The production of a text: the life and times of Blyton and Christie
- Chapter Three Detective fiction: definitions, conventions and formulae
- Chapter Four Gender constructs: the portrayal of gender roles in the writing of Blyton and Christie
- Chapter Five Classism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia and racism: the portrayal of social constructs in the writing of Blyton and Christie
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
