artin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature is an exhaustive, 1000-page tome that nevertheless omits from its pages some writers whose works are among the most liked and well-regarded of their respective genres. It's inevitable that any compilation will exclude many talented writers due to space constraints, but too often writers are shunned because the criteria used by critics and academics to judge their literature differs from that commonly used by other writers. Critics and academics view literature from the perspective of ethics, philosophy, psychology, religion, and political and social criticism, and assume that writers primarily intend—or should primarily intend—their work to be a tool to address such topics. Genre writers, in contrast, usually view literature as a rhetorical art. Does the author draw interesting and dynamic characters? Does he tell a good story? It is not uncommon, therefore, to find writers who are esteemed by their colleagues but dismissed by critics and academics.
Agatha Christie's works fall into this category. Laura Thompson's Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life shows that despite their escapist nature, Christie's books showcase her considerable literary skill and insight into the high-minded, serious topics preferred by critics and academics. But Christie is often overlooked in studies of “serious” literature because she wrote genre fiction and because she used her insight into high-minded subjects as material in the construction of a literary edifice, rather than using a literary edifice as a vehicle for addressing such subjects. Her restraint is to her credit. In the same way that painters must have a detailed knowledge of human anatomy to depict it convincingly on canvas, good genre writers must understand human psychology. Genre writers paint a verbal picture with the aim of revealing the human soul, not to be the co-authors in a psychological study.
Shakespeare provides the best examples of a properly artistic use of “serious” subject matter. His plays were written for mass appeal, often built around plots as implausibly escapist as any mystery investigated by Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. His subplots—often seemingly tangential and superfluous—were a late Renaissance exercise in making his works marketable. They drew the less educated, less cultured Englishmen to the theater, often seemingly detracting from a play's artistic quality, combining “entertainment” with “art.” This combination is not unusual. Agatha Christie chose to write “entertainment” exclusively, not because she was a literary lightweight, but because she had the talent to hide seriousness inside entertainment.
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