THE FEMINISTIC COMPONENT IN THEFEMALE DETECTIVE NOVEL: THE COMPARATIVE ASPECT (ON THE BASIS OF WORKS BY IRENE ROZDOBUDKO “THE DOUBLE GAME IN FOUR HANDS” AND “GAUDY NIGHT”BY DOROTHY SAYERS)

The article deals with the feminist component in the detective novels «The Double Game in Four Hands» by I. Rozdobudko and «Gaudy Night» by D. Sayers. Its dominant features are distinguished: original female images and women's writing which is manifested through the detailing and usage of parenthetical constructions. The common and distinctive features of the use of the feminist component in the Ukrainian and English female detective discourse are described. The similarity and difference in the images of Musya Gurchyk and Harriet Vane who are the expressions of the creative method of detective writers are analyzed. The emotional and detailing functions of the parenthetical constructions are described. It is emphasized that the feminist component plays an important role in the creation of the genre of the female detective novel.

Saints and Miracles: The End of the Affair

Miracles rarely appear in novels, yet Graham Greene includes several of them in The End of the Affair. Sarah Miles heals a boy suffering from appendicitis and a man with a disfigured cheek. Like a saint, she seems to heal or revive through her compassionate touch, as when she raises her lover, who may or may not have died in a bomb blast, by touching his hand. This chapter locates Sarah’s interventions amidst debates about miracles, beginning with David Hume’s sceptical rejection of inexplicable phenomena, through such mid-century books as C. S. Lewis’s Miracles and Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. The inherent godlessness of novels, as Georg Lukacs puts the matter in Theory of the Novel, would seem to ban mystical content altogether from novelistic discourse. Yet this chapter argues for the revaluation of mystical content—the ordeals of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, for example—within the generic precincts of the novel.

The Twentieth-Century Literary Tradition

This chapter explores significant aspects of the Tractarian tradition, surviving into the twentieth century, in the works of T. S. Eliot, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Rose Macaulay, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and Barbara Pym. By the twentieth century, virtually every reference in literature to Anglican faith and practice reflected the Oxford Movement, but the most concentrated influence of Tractarianism is to be found in the writers discussed here. All of them, at various periods in their lives, were deeply immersed in the Catholic movement of the Church of England and their poetry and prose must be appreciated in light of that commitment and tradition.

Aspiration to the Extraordinary

Examines fancy dress, which was wildly popular wear for costume parties in the early twentieth century. In a range of popular publications, authors suggest that such costumes cannot change or transform the characters that wear it. In contrast, Woolf and Dorothy Sayers write fiction in which costumes can utterly change those who wear them but limit such powers to upper-class, highly educated characters

AFTER MY OWN HEART: DOROTHY SAYERS' FEMINISM

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, published in 1936, explores still-topical questions about the relation of epistemological and ethical values, and about the place of women in the life of the mind. In her wry reflections on the radical differences between today's feminist philosophy and Sayers' no-nonsense observation that “women are more like men than anything else on earth,” Susan Haack draws both on this detective story and on Sayers' wonderfully brisk essay, ‘Are Women Human?’