Hi iS ANYONE STUDYING PD JAMES WITHIN THE CRIME FICTION GENRE? IF SO CAN SOMEONE HELP ME OUT WITH THE CONTEXT OF THE TEXT - THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN iM AWARE THAT IT REFELCTS BRITAIN WITHIN THE 1980S BUT I JUST NEED SOME MORE INFO PLEASE
Sorry i didnt mean to shout. i totally forgot i was writing in capital text and not to mention the connoatations associated with my text. Sorry
But do you have any infor regarding Britain in the times James was writing in?
thanks
i'm doing skull beneath the skin too, but i'm clueless
btw... where is desdemona from? it's so familiar... is it from some text we studied at school?
OH! othello hehehe
Hi yes i got my name from Othello, we studied the play last year and i just love it! what have you done so far in extension? i have read the text PD James but im still unsure about the context. i know how it relates to the genre of CF and how it fits within the 'cosy' subgenre. She takes a group of different people to an isolated setting ( courcy island) where the murder of clarissa takes place. actually i cant stand the character Clarissa, so snobbish and a cow! I know Ambrose gets away with bantering her to death due to his class. Threfore i can interpret the text from that perspective. but what i ould love to know is what britain was like then?
hope you can help. i can help you with other elements of the text. im sure you have some interesting ideas about the text
The main work on context we've been doing has been about how social classes have been presented in the text and Cordelia being a female detective (just as a clue- the first Cordelia Gray novel was called 'An Unsuitable Job For a Woman')
Thank you for the information. What else have you been doing in regards to PD. James? the elite upper class are presented as corrupt and distorted whereas the working class are presented as honest.
The class differentiation is an important aspect of the novel, how the characters interact with each other, what defines them, and by placing them in the isolated setting, their flaws and weaknesses are exposed. There are tonnes of websites about it all...easy to find all the info.
Our teacher stated that an important facet of the novel was the way James manipulated Cozy and to a lesser degree Hardboiled sub-genre elements to introduce a very flexible sense of time and continuity, simultaneously giving us a sense of reality when reading the novel and the crime, but also a distancing effect so that we are made to feel distinctly separate from the characters. ie that it is meant to make us slightly unsure of the time frame as there are allusions to an earlier age like that of agatha christie's novels but as the novel progresses it is slowly made more modern eventually gaining an eighties feel.