[ecrea] CfP: Poirot Meets Miss Marple - Agatha Christie and Intermediality

Call for Proposals

See the complete CfP as PDF here:
http://www.zwf-medien.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Poirot_trifft_Miss_Marple_-_Agatha_Christie_Intermedial.pdf

Judith Kretzschmar, Sebastian Stoppe, Susanne Vollberg (Eds.)
Poirot Meets Miss Marple: Agatha Christie and Intermediality (working title)

Agatha Christie is an unprecedented iconic figure in 20th century
detective fiction. In 2015, it is her 125th anniversary and to date
about two billion copies of her books have been sold making her third in
the rankings of the world’s most-widely sold books (behind Shakespeare
and the Bible).
Therefore it is no surprise at all that her entire oeuvre has been
adapted into other media again and again. Besides numerous film and
television adaptations, Christie’s novels and short stories were
transformed into theatre plays and radio dramas but also into graphic
novels, games, and a Japanese anime series. In our book we want to shed
some light on the intermediality of Agatha Christie’s oeuvre. We
expressly want to include all kinds of media (not only film and TV) as
well as all of Christie’s work. So, proposals which deal with other
Christie stories aside from Poirot and Miss Marple like Tommy and
Tuppence Beresford are welcomed.

Proposals shall refer to one of these topics we are interested in:

- Plot Differences: There are many ways to adapt an Agatha Christie
story. Sometimes a Poirot story has been rewritten for a Miss Marple
adaption or an original Miss Marple screenplay was written which did not
have a direct literary source. Christie herself did a heavy rewrite of
Appointment With Death for the theatre by eliminating Poirot as the main
character. How do different adaptions relate with the original stories?
Why do some adaption remain faithful to their source? Why there are
certain changes in plot details with other adaptations?
- Good Old Days: Over the years, Agatha Christie established different
times in her novels. Curtain, for example, is set after the Second World
War while her first Poirot story The Mysterious Affair at Styles
happened during World War I. However, the TV series Poirot is largely
set in the 1930s. Likewise, both of the two TV series starring Miss
Marple establish different time periods than their literary source. Why
is that and in which ways different time periods were used for aesthetic
or dramaturgical reasons in the adaptations?
- Complex Motifs: Most Agatha Christie stories are classic whodunits. A
murder is committed, the de-tective character enters and solves the
crime. In the end, the entire cast of characters is summoned to a final
meeting: the denouement begins. Often, Christie used a special group of
people in her novels: a travel group, patrons in a hotel, a social
gathering. In which way the complex motifs of these people are being
treated, both in original and adaptation?
- Cast of Characters: Most of Christie’s characters are somewhat
stereotypical. Poirot is a foreigner and most often being taken for a
French instead of Belgian, Miss Marple is some sort of a gossip (most
evident in The Murder of the Vicarage), there is the noble British
gentry, veterans from the colonies of the British Empire, but also the
newly-rich but still vulgar American. In the adaptations, Peter Ustinov
and Margaret Rutherford were radical different in their portrayal of
Poirot and Miss Marple than David Suchet and Jane Hickson, respectively,
in the TV series. So how are the characters of the Christie sto-ries
being shown in different media?
- Distant Places: Agatha Christie chose distinct venues for her stories.
There is the train or a hotel as a recurring location but also the river
boat, the country house or places in the British colonies. In which way
these locations are important in original and adaptation?
- Intertextuality: There have always been direct or indirect references
(visually as well as in dialogue or sound) on Agatha Christie’s oeuvre
in other works of fiction? Where do we find these references either as
tribute or parody in other works regardless of specific genres or media?
In which ways these references are made (use of characters, plot or
dialogue) and how do they relate to Agatha Christie’s stories?

The call addresses all academics in media and communication studies as
well as people with interdisciplinary skills in literary and dramatics
studies.
Chapters shall be written in English or German. The book is scheduled to
be released at the end of 2015 within the book series MedienRausch of
Zentrum für Wissenschaft und Forschung | Medien, a scientific
association of media scholars based in Leipzig, Germany. The series is
published by the Büchner Verlag Darmstadt, Germany.

We are looking forward to a one-page proposal from you describing your
contribution and including a short CV. Please send your proposal to
(sebastian.stoppe /at/ uni-leipzig.de) until March 15, 2015. You will be
notified whether your proposal has been accepted. The complete chapters
shall be finished until mid of August 2015.

For further information, please ask Sebastian Stoppe at
(sebastian.stoppe /at/ uni-leipzig.de).

www.zwf-medien.de

--
Dr. Sebastian Stoppe
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter / Research Associate

Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
FID Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften
Beethovenstr. 6
04107 Leipzig

mail: (sebastian.stoppe /at/ uni-leipzig.de)
www.sebastian-stoppe.de


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