The Sleuth And The Goddess

Rowland presents a detailed exploration of how the archetypes of ancient goddesses Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite breathe into and shape female-authored detective fiction. Representing aspects of characterisation not bound by gender, the book examines how these archetypes emerge in themes like the home and hearth, hunting, survival and desire. Rowland assesses numerous examples from a range of works, providing a clear illustration of each archetype and illuminating aspects of femininity, psyche and being. This uniquely interdisciplinary work of literary analysis sheds light on the popularity and underlying mystique of the genre.

Rowland presents a detailed exploration of how the archetypes of ancient goddesses Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite breathe into and shape female-authored detective fiction. Representing aspects of characterisation not bound by gender, the book examines how these archetypes emerge in themes like the home and hearth, hunting, survival and desire. Rowland assesses numerous examples from a range of works, providing a clear illustration of each archetype and illuminating aspects of femininity, psyche and being. This uniquely interdisciplinary work of literary analysis sheds light on the popularity and underlying mystique of the genre.

With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

This critical study explores late twentieth century novels by women writers—including Doris Lessing, May Sarton and Barbara Pym—that feature female protagonists over the age of sixty. These novels’ discourses on aging contrast with those largely pejorative ones that dominate Western society. They break the silence that normally surrounds the lives of the aged, and this book investigates how older female protagonists are represented in relation to areas such as sexuality, dependence and everyday life. Beginning with an investigation of popular opinions about aging and a survey of hypotheses from disciplines including gerontology, psychology and feminism, the text reviews literary critical attitudes toward fictions of aging; analyzes representations of physically dependent characters, whose anger over their failing bodies is often eased by relationships with their female friends; discusses how paradigms of female sexuality exclude the possibility of older women being sexually desirable; examines characters that live a contented life, finding a more polemical side to them than is noted in more conventional literary critiques; and analyzes the aged sleuth in classical detective fiction.

Jungian Arts-Based Research and "The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico" provides clear, accessible and in-depth guidance both for arts-based researchers using Jung’s ideas and for Jungian scholars undertaking arts-based research. The book provides a central extended example which applies the techniques described to the full text of Joel Weishaus’ prose poem The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico, published here for the first time. Designed as a "how-to" book, Jungian Arts-Based Research and "The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico" explores how Jung contributes to the new arts-based paradigm in psychic functions such as intuition, by providing an epistemology of symbols that includes the unconscious, and research strategies such as active imagination. Rowland examines Jung’s The Red Book as an early example of Jungian arts-based research and demonstrates how this practice challenges the convention of the detached researcher by providing holistic knowing. Arts-based researchers will find here a psychic dimension that also manifests in transdisciplinarity, while those familiar with Jung’s work will find in arts-based research ways to foster diversity for a decolonized academy. This unique project will be essential reading for Jungian and post-Jungian academics and scholars, arts-based researchers of all backgrounds and readers interested in transdisciplinarity.

Nominated for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical / Biography The first specifically academic companion to contemporary scholarship on the work of Agatha Christie, this book includes chapters by an international group of scholars writing on topics and fields of study as various as ecocriticism and the anthropocene, popular modernism, middlebrow fiction, queer theory, feminism, crime and the state, and more. It addresses a broad selection of Christie's crime novels, as well as her short stories, literary novels written pseudonymously, and her own and others' dramatic adaptations for television, film, and the stage. Featuring unprecedented access to images and content held in Christie's personal archive, as well as a Foreword from renowned crime fiction writer Val McDermid, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Christie's work and legacy.