Conundrums For The Long Week End

"In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional hero to comment on, and come to terms with, the social upheaval of the time: world wars, the crumbling of the privileged aristocracy, the rise of democracy, and the expanding struggle of women for equality. A reflection of the age, Lord Peter's character changed tremendously, mirroring the developing subtleties of his creator's evolving worldview." "Scholars of the Modern Age, fans of the mystery genre, and admirers of Sayers's fiction are sure to appreciate McGregor and Lewis's incisive examination of the literary, social, and historical context of this prized author's most popular work."--Jacket.

In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein’s theory quickly became a rich cultural resource with many uses beyond physical theory. Media coverage of relativity in Britain took on qualities of pastiche and parody, as serious attempts to evaluate Einstein’s theory jostled with jokes and satires linking relativity to everything from railway budgets to religion. The image of a befuddled newspaper reader attempting to explain Einstein’s theory to his companions became a set piece in the popular press. Loving Faster than Light focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry. Loving Faster than Light is an essential read for anyone interested in popular science, the intersection of science and literature, and the social and cultural history of physics.

Levay analyzes representations of the criminal in British and American modernism from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s.

Few writers in the twentieth century were as creative and productive as Dorothy L. Sayers, the English playwright, novelist, and poet. In this volume in the Hansen Lectureship Series, Christine Colón explores the role of community in Sayers's works. In particular, she considers how Sayers offers a vision of communities called to action, faith, and joy, and she reflects on how we also are called to live in community together.

Bruce Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

In his study of Golden Age and hard-boiled detective fiction from 1890 to 1950, Yan Zi-Ling argues that these two subgenres can be distinguished not only by theme and style, but by the way they structure knowledge, value, and productive labour. Using the detective as a reference point and enactor of socially based interests, Yan shows that Golden Age texts are distinguished by their conservationism (and not only by their conservatism), with the detectives’ actions serving to stabilize institutions with specific ideological aims. In contrast, the criminal investigations of the hard-boiled detective, who is poorly aligned with institutions and strong interest groups, reveal the fragility of the status quo in the face of escalating cycles of violence. Key to Yan’s discussion are theories of exchange, value, and the gift, the latter of which he suggests is more akin to detective work than is wage labour. Analyzing texts by a wide range of authors that includes Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, Raoul Whitfield, George Harmon Coxe, and Mickey Spillane, Yan demonstrates that the detective’s truth-generating function, most often characterized as a process of discovery rather than creation, is in fact crucial to the institutional and class-based interests that he or she serves.

This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

A volume of essays exploring some of the best genre fiction of the last 40 years.

In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly—and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis’s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.

Christianity and the Detective Story is the first book to gather together academic criticism on this particular connection between religion and popular culture. The articles cover the origin of this relationship in the works of G. K. Chesterton, examine its development through the “Golden Age” of mystery writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, and include discussions of recent and contemporary television crime dramas. The volume makes a strong case for viewing mystery writing as a valid means of providing both entertainment and religious insight.