![]() ![]() Poirot, as a perfect classical detective figure, keeps the world whole. He is a hero of comprehension and a champion of comprehensibility. Where the writers who would be later canonized as “modernists” (Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, etc.) expressed a profound sense of anxiety and seemed always to think of the world as breaking apart, Agatha Christie’s staple detective-hero reassuringly manages to put things back together.Ĭase in point: In Christie’s hero, Hercule Poirot, we have a figure of astounding holistic tendencies, capable of weaving together that which appears scattered, clarify that which seems hopelessly murky. Nearly 100 years removed from the moment, genre writers like Agatha Christie now can clearly be seen as a counterpoint to the vaunted literary novelists of the day, not only in formula and subject, but more importantly, in terms of theme, implication, and in terms of the philosophical purport of the narratives they were producing. ![]() ![]() Another response took the form of wild, highly psychological literary experimentation. The detective fiction genre was one of many responses to modernity and its changes. These early 20th century movements in literature each responded to rapid changes taking place in society: technological and industrial advance, wars of an epic and unprecedented scale, and pervasive intellectual upheaval. Modernism and the Golden Era of detective fiction occupy overlapping periods of history. ![]()
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