Writing Performances

WINNER OF THE BARBARA REYNOLDS AWARD!

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.

Employing the insight of contemporray performance theory, Writing Performances argues that Dorothy L. Sayers anticipated by decades the postmodern ironizing of Englightenment sensibilities--not in spite of her Anglo-Catholic convictions, but because of them.

Crystal Downing is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. Her discussions of postmodern discourse appear in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Religion and the Arts, Books and Culture, Literature/Film Quarterly, and College Literature. She brings Dorothy L. Sayers to the discussion in Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation. Like Sayers, Downing is fascinated by architecture, earning her doctorate at the University of California at Santa Barbara by assessing descriptions of architecture in nineteenth and early twentieth century English literature.