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Whose Trauma? Dorothy L. Sayers's Use of Shell Shock and the Role of Memory in Interwar Detective Fiction.

This essay places interwar understandings of shell shock in conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body? (1923), arguing that Sayers utilizes the genre of detective fiction to revise cultural conceptions of shell shock as a marker of cowardice, situating it instead as a valuable reminder of the...

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Published in:Clues: A Journal of Detection (McFarland & Company) Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 51 - 61
Main Author: Hendrickson, Kathryn
Format: Article
Published: McFarland & Company, Inc. Fall2020
Subjects:
Sayers, Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh), 1893-1957
Mystery fiction
Interwar Period (1918-1939)
Fiction genres
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:This essay places interwar understandings of shell shock in conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body? (1923), arguing that Sayers utilizes the genre of detective fiction to revise cultural conceptions of shell shock as a marker of cowardice, situating it instead as a valuable reminder of the present's continual connection to the past.