Silvia Baučeková
The Flavour of Murder
Číslo: 1/2014
Periodikum: Prague Journal of English Studies
Klíčová slova: Classic crime fiction; Agatha Christie; food; murder; domesticity; feminization
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Anotace:
Food and murder have had a paradoxical relationship ever since the fi rst prehistoric
hunter-gatherers put the fi rst morsels of meat into their mouths. On one hand, eating
means life: food is absolutely necessary to sustain life. On the other hand, eating means
killing. Whether it is the obvious killing of an animal for meat, or the less obvious
termination of a plant’s life, one must destroy life in order to eat. It is assumed that
this inherent tension between eating/living and eating/dying o en informs and
shapes crime narratives, not only in the recently invented genre of culinary mystery,
produced most famously by Diane Mott Davidson and Joanne Fluke, but also, even
if to a lesser extent, in classic detective novels of the 20th century. is article focuses
on how the contradictory nature of eating is manifested in the work of Agatha Christie.
By combining a traditional structuralist approach to crime fi ction as a formula,
as advocated by John G. Cawelti, with the methods of the emerging fi eld of food
studies, the paper aims to observe a classic, i.e., the classic detective story, from a new
perspective.
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hunter-gatherers put the fi rst morsels of meat into their mouths. On one hand, eating
means life: food is absolutely necessary to sustain life. On the other hand, eating means
killing. Whether it is the obvious killing of an animal for meat, or the less obvious
termination of a plant’s life, one must destroy life in order to eat. It is assumed that
this inherent tension between eating/living and eating/dying o en informs and
shapes crime narratives, not only in the recently invented genre of culinary mystery,
produced most famously by Diane Mott Davidson and Joanne Fluke, but also, even
if to a lesser extent, in classic detective novels of the 20th century. is article focuses
on how the contradictory nature of eating is manifested in the work of Agatha Christie.
By combining a traditional structuralist approach to crime fi ction as a formula,
as advocated by John G. Cawelti, with the methods of the emerging fi eld of food
studies, the paper aims to observe a classic, i.e., the classic detective story, from a new
perspective.