English 383

Gendre, Genre, Society – Women as Authors of Detective Fiction in the early 20th Century



  1. Juliet Mitchell: "As any society changes its social structure, changes its economic base, artefacts are re-created within it. Literary forms arise as one of the ways in which changing subjects create themselves as subjects within a new social context. The novel is the prime example of the way women start to create themselves as social subjects under bourgeois capitalism – create themselves as a category: women." (From: "Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis" in Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader:100)


  2. Edmund Wilson: "I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt that my correspondents had been playing her as their literary ace. But, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a filed which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all." (From: "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" in The Art of the Mystery Story:392)


  3. Ralph Cohen: "We realize now how inadequate a conception of literature is that takes no account of paintings that include writing or illustrate writing, that disregards the music in sung prayers and oratorios, that sees no relation between Descartes’s Mediations and the meditative poem or Shaftesbury’s and Mandevilles’s dialogues and the development of the novel, between the narratives of criminals and the parodies of affairs of state." (From: "Generating Literary Histories" in New Historical Literary Study:50)


  4. Janice Radway: "Like all other commercial commodities in our industrial culture, literary texts are the result of a complicated and lengthy process of production that is itself controlled by a host of material and social factors…. Because literary critics tend to move immediately from textual interpretation to sociological explanation, they conclude easily that changes in textual features or generic popularity must be the simple and direct result of ideological shifts in the surrounding culture…. Although this kind of argument sounds logical enough, it rests on a series of tenuous assumptions about the equivalence of critics and readers and ignores the basic facts about the changing nature of book production and distribution in contemporary America. [Ann] Douglas’s explanatory strategy assumes that purchasing decisions are a function only of the content of a given text and of the needs of readers. In fact, they are deeply affected by a book’s appearance and availability as well as by readers’ awareness and expectations. Book buying, then, cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between a book and a reader." (From "The institutional matrix of romance" in The Cultural Studies Reader:438-39)



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