The Corpus in the Library: The Turn to Dorothy L. Sayers

This chapter introduces the second part of the study, which turns from allusions to Shakespeare and the Bible in Christie and Sayers to allusions by other detective writers to Sayers’ own novels. It sketches the direction of allusion to Shakespeare and the Bible in the late twentieth century, which was increasingly “professionalized” into characters whose jobs brought them into connection with these texts. It surveys scholarship on allusion and appropriation which will provide critical framing for the later chapters, and presents a distinctive form of “item-allusion” which detective fiction employs.