Representations of the media and their effects in David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

McQuail, Jack

Abstract

This study concerns the novels of the Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002), the first published works of David Peace, a British author born in West Yorkshire in 1967 and the author’s use of an essentially conservative genre – crime fiction – to present an alternative account of a pivotal decade, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, for the UK and, more specifically, for the English North. Under investigation is the significance that Peace affords to the operations and concerns of the news media, whose influence is apparent in both the subject matter - the centrality of journalist characters and their activities – and the form - in the narrative drive that news stories provide and in the repetitive and insistent news headlines which punctuate the texts. I will consider the ways in which Peace’s earliest novels both utilise and challenge conventions of genre and their relationship to a tradition of crime writing, in fiction, in the reporting of crime as news and in the nebulous territory of ‘True Crime’. I will pay attention to the very particular historical period which Peace has chosen to set his novels, as a post-second world war ‘settlement’ gave way to the vicissitudes of the free-market, and at the developments in the UK’s media industry which accompanied this considerable societal shift. Also significant and visited here is the Quartet’s geographical siting and the author’s interrogation of the way that the North has come to be conceived in the public imagination as distinct, sometimes ‘other’. Finally, the thesis will investigate some of the moral issues raised by the novels; at the political direction the reader sees emerging, at the author’s presentation of crimes and at the media’s role in articulating a public morality. The thesis is written with theories of the media and culture that were developed by pioneering critical theorists and UK based cultural materialists in mind.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Mar 23, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 12, 2024
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10579870
• Award Date: Aug 12, 2024