Bringing up the Body (don’t mention the war): Traumatic Return in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors
Bryonny Muir
Expanding the bounds of genre and gender to include popular writers when considering belated intermodernist confrontation with impact First World War reveals that at a widely accessible level, readers could find fictions which offered them methodology for re-enacting painful memories experiences in order master them. Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novel The Nine Tailors (1934) focuses on rural community, Fenchurch St Paul, garnished visible traces centuries English history. This representation is form epistemological romance, interlacing past present attempt reclaim these as living history rather than markers pastness. As 1930s itself, imaginative retreat exploded by return public memory: Tailors, this occurs corpse metonymically loaded wartime significance. Its resurrection forcibly returns characters battlefield, it only re-traumatization its veteran-hero sound village bells remembered roar artillery fuse provides closure mystery, narrative, past.
English