Poirot, the Bourgeois Prophet : Agatha Christie’s Biblical Adaptations
(2019) In Scriptural Traces p.149-166- Abstract
- Agatha Christie’s canon from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is sometimes said to be surpassed in popularity only by the Bible. But is a large and faithful readership the only connection between the ‘Queen of Crime’ and the ‘Book of Books’? In this chapter, I argue that Christie’s popular detective hero, Hercule Poirot, becomes a mode of adapting religion to the modern world of Europe after the First World War, a world interpreted as increasingly secular. The question Christie’s crime fiction asks, and that Poirot forms an answer to, is: how to affirm a collective anxiety about an unstable middle-class world, while promoting a religious sensibility that can endure in a secularising century?
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/82d7bc8c-748f-4b03-a614-59b699503653
- author
- Strømmen, Hannah M. LU
- publishing date
- 2019
- type
- Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
- publication status
- published
- subject
- host publication
- The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama : Murderous Texts - Murderous Texts
- series title
- Scriptural Traces
- editor
- Blythe, Caroline and Jack, Alison
- pages
- 17 pages
- publisher
- T&T Clark
- external identifiers
-
- scopus:85184549549
- ISBN
- 9780567695536
- 9780567677983
- 9780567677990
- 9780567686466
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- no
- id
- 82d7bc8c-748f-4b03-a614-59b699503653
- date added to LUP
- 2024-03-29 15:53:30
- date last changed
- 2024-09-14 21:22:20
@inbook{82d7bc8c-748f-4b03-a614-59b699503653, abstract = {{Agatha Christie’s canon from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is sometimes said to be surpassed in popularity only by the Bible. But is a large and faithful readership the only connection between the ‘Queen of Crime’ and the ‘Book of Books’? In this chapter, I argue that Christie’s popular detective hero, Hercule Poirot, becomes a mode of adapting religion to the modern world of Europe after the First World War, a world interpreted as increasingly secular. The question Christie’s crime fiction asks, and that Poirot forms an answer to, is: how to affirm a collective anxiety about an unstable middle-class world, while promoting a religious sensibility that can endure in a secularising century?}}, author = {{Strømmen, Hannah M.}}, booktitle = {{The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama : Murderous Texts}}, editor = {{Blythe, Caroline and Jack, Alison}}, isbn = {{9780567695536}}, language = {{eng}}, pages = {{149--166}}, publisher = {{T&T Clark}}, series = {{Scriptural Traces}}, title = {{Poirot, the Bourgeois Prophet : Agatha Christie’s Biblical Adaptations}}, year = {{2019}}, }