Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Caroline Reitz
Committee Members
Talia Schaffer
Tanya Agathocleous
Subject Categories
Literature in English, British Isles
Keywords
detective fiction, domesticity, fin de siècle, world war i, englishness, gender
Abstract
This dissertation considers the relationship between domesticity and Englishness in narratives about disturbances in the home in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English fiction. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of what it terms “domestic detective fiction”: crime stories with domestic settings whose conflict arises from fraught household dynamics and requires the intervention of an investigatory agent for resolution. It argues that the entanglement of ideas about the home and nation in this period produces narratives of domestic disruption that work to register and negotiate anxieties about England and English national identity, and that these anxieties are inseparable from the constructions of gender with which domesticity is intertwined. The introduction charts the relationship between ideas about the home, Englishness, and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and proposes nostalgia as a key feature of the construction of English identity, especially as that identity inheres in putatively English spaces. It further argues that conventional readings of detective fiction as a form frame it as fundamentally nostalgic, and so overlook the ways that the genre engages with and works to shape cultural responses to its historical moment(s). The dissertation’s four chapters are organized in two chronological parts, each pairing a significant moment in the development of the detective fiction genre with another contemporaneous literary category that registers domestic disruptions. The first part focuses on the fin de siècle, with chapters on New Woman fiction—namely Mona Caird’s depiction of domestic violence and spousal murder in The Wing of Azrael (1889)—and Sherlock Holmes’s investigations of mysterious deaths at Gothic manor houses. These chapters situate their respective narratives of domestic crisis and upheaval in the context of contemporary anxieties about cultural degeneration and gender, and argue that both Caird and Arthur Conan Doyle present the traditional English home as a site of violence. The second part focuses on the First World War, with chapters on home front novels (by H. G. Wells and Rebecca West) and Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). These chapters attend to the ways these texts negotiate nostalgic constructions of pre-war England as they manifest around English country houses and the gender and social structures therein, ultimately undermining efforts to present England as a space of safety; they also locate the emergence of Christie’s generation of detective fiction within an anti-nostalgic tradition of home front literature. Taken together, these four chapters illuminate both the imbrication of anxieties about domestic and national crises in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries and domestic detective fiction’s engagement with these anxieties, which proves to be more interrogative and open-ended than has previously been understood.
Recommended Citation
Mackenzie, Alyssa, "Domestic Disruptions: Detective Fiction and the English Home, 1880–1920" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6656
