- Title
- Creative, critical, intertextual: Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Text Vol. 37, Issue October
- Relation
- http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue37/content.htm
- Publisher
- Australasian Association of Writing Programs
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- This article is something of an apologia for rereading Agatha Christie, whose work is all too often deemed lacking in creativity, or, at the very least, the richness of the literary, or non-genre-based, text. Judging by her autobiography, even the author herself, a lover of 'the classics', subscribed to some degree to this perception of her writing. Such perceptions, however, flow logically (or perhaps syllogistically) from ending-based responses to her work, according to which detective fiction (and especially the whodunit model within the bounds of which critics constrain her texts) has only one meaning, to wit, the solution to the crime as unveiled by the detective. Christie's works are nonetheless literary; they are texts, in other words, and indeed texts in other words. This textuality brims over and strains against the generic parameters that she is considered to have pioneered, but which have been set in stone by critics, those all-powerful readers. This article follows one line of flight beyond the bounds of the detectival solution. The marrow thrown by Hercule Poirot in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd will be shown to be a literary act par excellence, a sign of textual exuberance. Or perhaps not so much a sign (for all signs point to the solution, do they not?) as an explosion. I shall read the marrow for what it is - a marrow with a history; I shall try to go beyond the metaphorical in favour of the intertextual; and finally, rather than turning a blind eye to it in our pursuit of the murderer, I shall read it.
- Subject
- creative writing; crime fiction; Barthes, Roland; Christie, Agatha; Dickens, Charles; intextuality
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1331639
- Identifier
- uon:26674
- Identifier
- ISSN:1327-9556
- Language
- eng
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