Writing Performances

The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers

C. Downing

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781403964526
• eBook ISBN: 9781137122612
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

After Dorothy L. Sayers became famous for her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, she began investigating the mysteries of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, writing plays for both stage and radio. However, because her modernist contemporaries disdained both best-sellers and religious fiction, Sayers has been largely overlooked by the academy. Writing Performances is the first work to position Sayers' diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism. Employing exuberant illustrations from Sayers' detective fiction to make theoretical issues accessible, the book employs insights from performance theory to argue that Sayers, though a popularizer, presciently anticipated the postmodern ironizing of Enlightenment rationality and scientific objectivity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Abbreviations
• Setting the Stage: An Introduction
• 1 The Performance Begins Her(e): The Auto/biographical Sayers
• 2 Identifying Gender(ed) Performances
• 3 The Performance Builds: Sayers’s Architectural Imagination
• 4 Minding the Performance: Sayers’s Literary Criticism
• 5 The Performing Word: Sayers’s Unorthodox Orthodoxy
• 6 Begin Here: For the End(s) of the Performance
• Encore: A Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index